This post is a roll-up repost of the notes I shared as part of my campaign to get SW to take on the challenge of charting the future of the Green Berets. The ideas are mine, so they are far from gospel. I didn’t respond to most of the comments, because these ideas aren’t the point. The point is for the regiment, and SWC in particular, to take on the task of charting a way forward for green berets.

By all accounts SW has ignored the call, but I still think our regiment is ripe for a rethink. Perhaps SWJ or IWI is interested in hosting the debate we need to find our way forward.

All ideas below are just my chicken scratch; intended as much as sparks as their own ideas. What’re yours? Post them in the comments.

#1: THE GREEN IS THE CRITICAL PART.

The US military has a habit of ignoring our partner forces. I’ve been to plenty of wargames where green wasn’t even modeled. For those who don’t know, green is the color we use for our partners in a conflict. Friendlies are blue, enemies are red, and unknown or neutrals are yellow.

We didn’t get our green berets because of our relationship with our partners (the British Commandos gifted us our hats), but it’s why we should keep them.

Our military’s inability to focus on green forces is why Iraq, and in particular Afghanistan, ended as such abject failures. The same can be said about Vietnam.

But SF is different, which is why SF trained soldiers held their ground when the regular army trained forces melted around them. SF focusing on the green is why the Philippines and Colombia are held up today as examples of successful counterinsurgencies. Green is why Ukraine still stands today against the Russian invasion.

SF’s focus on relationships is why we have generational partnerships with not only these countries, but a hundred others around the globe.

SF will always be centered on our partner force, and every time we stray from that, we fail. Any future strategy which seeks to define green berets must have partners at its core.

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#2: WE'RE GOING TO SHRINK AS A REGIMENT.

There will be fewer serving GBs tomorrow than there are today. We’re already shrinking as a regiment, with on average, one SFODA ghosted per company. We can’t recruit, never mind train enough GBs to fill the regiment.

This means whatever solutions or changes we decide on for the regiment, we must accept a smaller regiment. This is our reality. We will have fewer GBs. We will do less. Vague pronouncements like ADM Bradley’s recent SOFWeek address won’t tell us what to cut out though. We need something closer to GEN Berger’s Force Design 2030. While the design changes are still debated, no one can dispute GEN Berger put some bodies in the hallway. He proposed cuts to enable change and within six months the USMC didn’t have tankers anymore.

In my opinion, one place we can look to cull is the GBs who never really wanted to do unconventional / irregular warfare. As an example, when I was a battalion XO we were taking the semi-annual training brief from a dive team which was quick to highlight they were ‘the only all level one dive certified detachment in the whole SF Group’. But when we asked that team for ideas on how they could employ UW in their target country, they came up with nothing.

‘You’re the Group’s only level one certified dive team, your target country sits along the most strategic littoral choke point in the world, and you can’t think of anything unconventional you could do to an adversary?’

Some people came out to selection just to get a handful of badges. We should show them the door.

#3: ‘IRREGULAR’ WARFARE IMPLIES THERE’S A ‘REGULAR’ ONE.

Every IW conference, there’s a session on the definition of IW. None of the arguments within are wrong per se, they just aren’t moving the needle. For me, this comes down to two principal reasons:

The ‘ir’ prefix must modify something and in this case it’s the false idea ‘regular war’ is a thing. Lord knows the joint services wish it was. They all want ‘regular war’ to be where tanks only need to fight tanks, ships to sink ships, and they can just bomb everything from the air to magically ‘win’. The problem is that just doesn’t exist. There is no war without all the messy politics and people that we try to shovel into a tiny two letter prefix, ‘ir’.

To create a military context without all those messy ‘ir’ bits, you have to zoom down to such a fine tactical level engagement, you end up looking at a single chess board in Central Park and call that ‘war’ while ignoring the whole park, and the entire island of Manhattan around it, as ‘unimportant’. ’Regular War’ was what Putin wanted in Ukraine. ‘Ir’ is why four years later he doesn’t have it. Belief in ‘Regular War’ is why we didn’t know what to do when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. ‘Ir’ is why they can.

But more importantly, #2: Honey Badger Don’t Care.

Let’s presume there’s a place in the multiverse where all the generals, all the academics, and all the politicians can agree on a definition of ‘irregular warfare’. It still won’t work. Why? Because true practitioners of ‘irregular warfare’ start right there. The poke around the dark corners and or some badly stitched seam and start picking. They pry up that loose corner of tile. They jimmy all the locks until they find the one which doesn’t close. They talk their way past the janitor.

A workable definition of IW isn’t going to help because true IW practitioners start right where everyone else says you should stop. IW is about finding uncovered flanks and overlooked avenues of approach. Wherever someone says ‘They’d never come from that way’, IW inevitably finds a way. IW practitioners don’t understand ‘asymmetric warfare’ because the idea of fighting symmetrically never occurred to them.

Every time you draw linguistic lines to demarcate warfare, IW practitioners just see fraktaline windows of opportunity. We actually welcome the attempt, because it gives us more options to try. Political Warfare is redundant. That’s just Politics squared. There’s no meaningful difference between UW and IW. Words don’t matter to us.

I can already hear old white beard Dave Maxwell firing up.

#4: THE SF REGIMENT NEEDS TO CRITIQUE ITSELF.

SF has relied on external criticism for too long. It was Ned Marsh’s piece in IWI that kicked off this latest push. Dave Maxwell, Maurice Duclos, and Justin McIntosh each provided their rebuttals. All of these are retired GBs.

Gordon Richmond sounded the call for the regiment to chart a new way forward last fall, but he did so as a Goodpaster Fellow. Even Ed Croot’s original paper was written while a Senior Service College student. All the best critiques come from outside the regiment. It’s time for the GBs inside the regiment to drive the conversation.

And there’s plenty to talk about. Contemporary conflict shows us our dated TTPs won’t work. ‘Afghan habits’ will get us killed. We need to devise a way forward.

There are also some ignored skeletons the regiment needs to unearth and properly put to bed. Between convicted felons, and Tongo Tongo, there are sins our regiment needs to both come to terms with and find ways to insulate against. If we don’t we repeat them again, and we will continue to hemorrhage talent. Green Beret and Medal of Honor recipient Earl D. Plumlee summed it up well: ‘What’s your green beret worth to you?’

The SF Regiment has too long relied on retirees and those outside the formations to write about needed changes. It’s time for the SF Groups to lead this conversation.

#5: SF SHOULD BE MASTERS OF THE THEORY OF WAR.

Almost two decades ago, my senior weapons sergeant pulled a dirty rifle out of a hole in the ground and set about examining it. Twenty minutes later you’d have thought a sommelier was describing a fine wine as he noted how a stray catch on the bolt revealed this was in fact a cheap Czechoslovakian knockoff, not a Russian original. All I saw was a rusted hunk of tetanus.

My weapons sergeant could do this, not because he was an expert in obscure Czech weapons from the early 1900s, but because the 18B course had taught him the ‘theory of bang’ and lit the cauldron of curiosity within him. My 18Cs were of a similar cloth. They were not standard army explosives technicians, but instead masters of the ‘theory of boom’. One day they would take explosive IEDs apart with nothing but a Gerber and a paint brush, and the next day they would make their own out of whatever was within arm’s reach, MacGyver style. I had medics who kept local burn and bomb victims alive with the ‘theory of blood’ they’d learned in the 18D course. and I had 18Es whose ‘theory of beep’ meant they could magic anything metal into an antenna while inventing ways to talk to partners who would never get near a SIPR or a CENTRIX terminal.

The Q-course teaches us all the essential basics, to include our bread-and-butter unconventional warfare. But a GBs education can’t stop when we leave the Q. We need lifelong learners who are always striving to be masters of the theory of warfare. We claim an SFODA can advise a battalion, but we don’t back that up with deed. We need to, because the joint force needs us to advise our partners to win their wars.

Sometimes this means advising a resistance force, but it also means advising indigenous forces, and on more than just counterinsurgency. We must master all forms of war and be ready to advise our military partners in high-end conflict as well. SFODAs need to know how to build engagement areas, how to echelon fires, and how to close kill webs.

SFODAs are where we start this education. Beyond just sharing the latest TTPs, SF teams should shadow tactical commanders on their CTC rotations. E6s shouldn’t promote to E7 until they’ve shadowed an Infantry, Armor, or Field Artillery company commander as they maneuver through a CTC rotation, with team leadership shadowing their parent battalions.

This is just the start. All GBs need to constantly curious about warfare. If you aren’t trying to find every way to kill everyone around you with everything within your reach, your beret is suspect.

#6: SOF IS NOT A MAIN EFFORT FORCE.

Plenty of people have described SOF as the main effort force in the GWOT, in Afghanistan and in Syria in particular. This is flat wrong.

This something Captain Davis knew almost twenty years ago. I was zoning out in the gymnasium at FOB Warhorse in Baqubah while the regiment rehearsed their rehearsal to show the Iraqi division how it was done. I was mostly tuning out the regiment’s planners because the day prior I had attended the Iraqi army’s brief. The Iraqi Division commander have given his brigade commanders final guidance already, and had begun executing the operation earlier that morning, without regular US army assistance.

I was startled alert by one of the Regiment’s planners introducing me, a lowly executive officer, to brief the main effort of phase four. ‘Excuse me?’ I stumbled, shaking myself out of my boredom. ‘Did you say main effort?’

The planner and his team all nodded at me. ‘But we’re not a main effort force…’ I was genuinely confused. ‘Like maybe early on, like in phase one or two, but four?’ I stammered. I delicately tried to explain the doctrine to the gathered soldiers: the Iraqi division was the main effort. For green berets, the partner is almost always our main effort (See Note #1). If Captain Davis knew this, there’s no excuse for our regiment’s senior officers to be ignorant of it.

Focusing on ‘main effort’ is a distraction from green beret’s true value, as force multipliers. It’s also how we ended up with GB teams who trained their partners to be little more than cordon forces, instead of working ourselves out of a job. It’s counting rounds fired instead of effects achieved.

#7: LANGUAGE ≠ CULTURE.

Ned’s not the first GB to push for cultural relevance. The SF regiment traditionally measures this via the misguided metric of language scores. Don’t get me wrong, willingness to learn a language goes a long, long way toward true partnership. But the regiment can never predict the vagaries of a 20 year career, nor should they try.

For example, I was taught Indonesian at Fort Bragg, (not at DLI in Monterey). While a student at Robin Sage my G-Chief didn’t know what to do with me: ‘No one speaks Indonesian in Pineland’.

Within a month of signing in at 1SFG I was in Diyala, Iraq, where they speak Arabic and Kurdish NOT Indonesian. I later went to Cambodia for a JCET, where they speak Khmer, NOT Indonesian. Then I took my team to Shindand, Afghanistan where they spoke Dari / Farsi and Pashtun / Urdu, NOT Indonesian. As a company commander I went to the Republic of Korea (Hangul) and Japan, NOT Indonesia. I later went back to Iraq before taking command in Oki, NOT Indonesia. I’m in Japan now, learning what Japanese I can, but my next job is probably going to require yet another language, which will NOT be Indonesian.

I think it’s more important to find GBs willing to eat any cuisine than it is to search for those who can get qualified in a specific language. Like, back in 2015, when one of my captains came to me to ask for more per-diem because, ‘The guys on my team don’t really like Korean food.’

I must have stared at him for a full minute before responding. ‘Did that sound as stupid coming out of your mouth as it did going in my ears?’

#8: WE TRAIN TOO MUCH 9MM.

I fired 4,000 rounds of 9mm my first day of SFAUC. Me. Not my whole SFODA. Just me. All to practice with a sidearm I’ve never actually used.

I’m probably one of the few people who think SFODAs already spend too much time plinking at 6” dots. It’s certainly the image we push on the five SF Group social media pages, where you’ll overwhelmingly find guys clearing rooms with guns. Some of this is likely part of our current lethality push, but it’s hurting our ability to recruit the people we need.

At best a 9mm can kill one person. But an SOFDA that sinks a RoRo stands to kill an armored brigade. Real lethality is leveraging every tool around you to enable the death and destruction the joint force needs from us. You can’t do that with a pistol. Just like you can’t close kill webs with a radio that doesn’t do data.

Much of the debate these days seems to be pro vs. anti-tech. I think this debate is dumb. Even a 9mm is just a tool. SF has always found ways to employ the best technology out there, which is why we don’t carry around PRC-77s and first generation thermals anymore. Every day we hear people claim we shouldn’t chase tech solutions in one breath, then try to justify aircraft carriers and F35s in the next. Don’t be mistaken; this isn’t ironic, it is intentional.

The tool doesn’t matter. It’s about enabling the partner (Note #1) to kill as many and as much as we can (Note #5) with whatever tools we can. In 1917 Tom Barry taught the IRA to kill the British with barely any ammo. Just two years ago the Ukrainians destroyed billions of dollars in Russian assets with cheap drones. It’s not about any specific tool, it’s about resistance.

We won’t be truly lethal and impactful by obsessing over any specific tech tool, but we won’t get there being Amish either. Fetishizing ‘low or no tech’ solutions won’t empower SFODAs on today’s battlefield. We need to embrace every tool and tech we can. Cheap sense and strike are part of that package.

#9: INFO-OPS ARE TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE TO PSYOPERS.

‘Bring me buffalo.’ This was the guidance to all the teams out in Okinawa. Their first task was to train hard and find new ways to fight across the first island chain. But they were also directed to capture media of that training for use as IO (InfoOps).

It took some time and repetition to change the culture. Excuses usually centered around the lack of a ComCam, which we never got. I explained to the teams, we didn’t do messaging, that was the IO types jobs. But they’re job was to go get good product. When my Wire memes didn’t land, I pivoted to a hunter gatherer approach.

‘Go get me buffalo. Not weak ass squirrel shit. I want buffalo. You don’t worry about making teepees or moccasins with it; you just get me buffalo.’

I’m sure the teams got tired of me beating the drum on it, but they also came around. We made an internal teams channel linking every ODA directly with every PAO / PO / and IO in the theater. Teams could upload their photos directly, without editorial control or pre-emptive review. The IO community was free to use and reuse as desired. Everything got mirrored on DVIDs.

Because it’s not just about what the military does with your messages, it’s about having content for non-mil sources to use. When Warhorse.org, NavySEALs.com and CoffeeOrDie.com ran stories about SF in the arctic, they used a 1-1 photo from a Seward’s Glacier in Alaska, a fact I never let my peer 10th GRP battalion commander live down.

When the Golden Knights jump into a football stadium, it might help recruiting. But, when your First Island Chain MFF team in the jumps onto a tiny island DZ smaller than that football field, it’s a messaging opportunity. And when one of the SF teams was training 25th ID in Hawaii, they intentionally took a picture of the biggest goddamn GB they had.

Now every story about SF on Taiwan features a towering GB. https://asiatimes.com/2024/03/us-green-berets-deploying-to-taiwans-front-line/

Messaging matters, and as a GB we need to make it a priority to our formations. All our operations are about multiplying combat power, and IO is an essential way we accomplish that.

What do you call it when a GB uses PsyOps like a sock puppet?

#10: ABOUT THAT BAR FIGHT…

I’ve always loved the Wild Bill Donovan’s ideal of SOF as ‘PhDs who can win a bar fight’. The motto is a large part of what drove me to apply for SF in the first place.

Except that turns out to not be true, because Donovan never said it (The Traveling Maxim – SOFX). It didn’t even enter the written record until two years after I donned my green beret. The quote so many of us have held dear to our hearts is apocryphal. It’s also not serving it’s purpose.

I love the motto because it so succinctly describes what we’re looking for in green berets: curious and clever people who can back up their ideas with actions and aren’t scared of getting muddy and scraping along the way. We want doers, even if that comes with the cost of people who struggle to put the partners they’re advising out front (Note #1). We select for a bias toward action.

The real problem with ‘PhDs who can win a bar fight,’ goes beyond just being made up. It also grants the worst of us license to do dumb and dangerous things. I can easily name fellow GBs who recited this back to me as some sort of excuse for their actions. Meanwhile, I’ve never met a single GBs that used this as an excuse to get their PhD. Plenty of the regiment took this amorphism to be a green light to get into needless and pretty fights; to be entitled to breaking the law.

We had a similar problem out in Oki. Oki is the ‘Land of Mission Command’, a day ahead of all three of its commands. It sits in the First Island Chain, a shorter flight to Taipei than it is to Tokyo; both three times the hallowed ‘golden hour’ other teams live by. It was because of this unique forward nature that Oki long ago picked up the moniker, ‘the pirate ship’.

Oki has long bread autonomous problem solvers; NCOs who came back to lead the group, to innovate and adapt and remain unflappable in the face of any challenge. ‘The pirate ship’ was born of command by negation. Except, somewhere along the way, the ideal of Horatio Hornblower gave way to Blackbeard. Lying and illegality slowly became accepted as the price of having GBs, who themselves began to act entitled. We had to drop the motto while I was there.

Call it the corollary to Godwin’s Rule: All mottos eventually stop being good for the organization. ‘If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying,’ probably started off with similar good intents, but now it condones more that it helps. SF needs to abandon the apocryphal barfight and find a new motto. Maybe, just like SF strategies, it must be refreshed from time to time by those still aboard the ship, still able to mend the sails and replace the boards (Note #4).

#11: THE ARMY WON’T FORWARD ASSIGN SF.

The idea of forward assigning SF sounds great. It enables us to immerse in the cultures we advise and become true masters of our partner’s way of life. Unfortunately, it’s never going to grow beyond small scale employment.

Units still need to practice their craft, and that is best done together, with support. Every unit requires external support to train, to equip themselves, even just to get their pay and allowances. Every unit in the army comes with these basic costs, costs that are always going to be better met near larger formations and bigger bases.

I’ve read more than one narrative which has advocated SOF should become its own unique force, outside the other defense services. This idea likely sounds appealing to GBs who’ve never served time outside the five SF Groups, but it won’t work. Let me assure you as someone who’s worked both at HRC and as a G8: GBs could not even get paid were it for not the army. Every service has a slew of unsexy functions which must be performed and GBs lack both the skills and the manpower to do them. We rely on the army for these functions, just like we rely on the army to help us recruit. We are not going to grow our service enough to provide them on our own (see Note #2).

We are also still in the army. SF has too often forgotten this fact. We pursued solutions that were inimical to the way the army runs. Worse, we often didn’t inform the army we were even pursuing them. Our officer promotions are set by law, and every time GBs try to carve a SF-unique means of employment we run up against the army promotion process, which we do not own. We can make changes to early NCO promotions (Note #6), but we quickly run up against congressional policy. We can, and should, seek to shape the army’s promotion process, but ignoring it is a fool’s errand.

GBs need to think of novel solutions to the tensions inherent to our branch. But these must be grounded within the structures of the army. If we want changes, we must work with the army to drive change.

#12: IT WAS NEVER ABOUT THE G-BASE.

Too many GBs graduate Robin Sage thinking long-tern fixed guerilla bases are a thing. Historically they aren’t. At least not outside safe havens (I’m looking at you Poland). Some people claim this is a change, a new consequence of novel technologies which make it ever harder to hide in plain sight.

The truth is it was never easy. Tom Barry described the challenges the IRA faced maintaining even a short-term G-base back before 1920. He includes a precarious escape story from a G-base in Ireland as the British closed in around them. In the intervening century, it’s only gotten harder.

This is one thing Ned gets both right and wrong in his original argument. He’s correct that today’s cheap sensors make it all but impossible to hide for long. I’ve written about the perils of cheap sense and strike in my Mass Effect Series and in a recent post.

But then it was never viable or easy to wage an irregular war from a hidden a G-base. SOF has always had to abide within McCraven’s relativize superiority, where time inevitably undermines our security. We’ve mitigated these risks through tradecraft to stretch those windows as far as we can. The only alternative is a safe haven, which is something every resistance movement also wants, if they plan to succeed.

But Ned’s wrong to think SF is facing this challenge alone. The regular army somehow hasn’t woken up to the obvious implication that 20 years of perfecting the art of finding a person in flip flops translates phenomenally to finding military hardware. The same tools that help us find a single smartphone make things like tanks and TOC cities glow painfully bright to our sensors. The EM signature alone is going to get everyone fighting from a DRASH tent killed in seconds.

So while Ned’s right to point out how GBs need to change the way we fight, that applies to everyone in every branch. Spectrum management is no longer a luxury, nor is it something some nerd at Corps has to deal with. Everyone’s going to need to get a lot leaner in the way we fight, and SF can help guide that way.

#13: WE USED TO RECRUIT PEOPLE LIKE JULIA CHILD.

We’ll never know what 6’2” Julia Child’s CFT score would have been. In 1940s America women were almost a century away from being allowed to try out for those sorts of roles in the OSS. Mrs. At least back then we were smart enough to see value in her talents.

A couple of years ago I was in a room full of SF leaders when someone asked, ‘Should we change the standards for earning the beret?’ The room’s answer, to a man, was, ‘Hell no.’ Except almost none of us actually knew what the standards that selected us were. Only SWC veterans get a glimpse behind the curtain.

I do know those GB standards haven’t been as iron clad as we all wish they had. Never mind how the star course and team week have both been dropped and re-added over the years. At one point our regiment was partitioning out 18A start dates by the maximum number of pull-ups applicants could do.

Now I’m good at pull-ups, so you’d think I’d be in favor of such an approach. But I find myself wondering what better criterion would be. I’m not naive enough to think we didn’t lose out on some very talented operators over the years through our obsession with heavy rucks and long runs.

Even Today, I don’t know my own SFAS score. I don’t think I ever will. But I do know that when pushed to determine my worth, one cadre member called me ‘trainable.’ Two decades later this is still the greatest compliment anyone ever gave me.

Any combat arms applicant needs to meet the standards set out in the army’s AFT and CFT. Both are very doable. Everyone who meets those standards is welcome to try out in my eye. Not all of them will get selected. But we should be selecting for more than a penis and pull-ups.

#14: THAAD IS A BETTER INVESTMENT THAN SF.

Using expensive bespoke missiles like Patriot to shoot down cheap strike like Shaheds is bad tactics. But it’s also good business, which is a large part of why our military has been so resistant to change. SF can’t claim the same.

GBs might be super fungible, but we don’t employ a lot of people. We’re little more than a passion project for several interested and passionate congress members. But we don’t bring many jobs to their districts. A bunch of retired sergeants major point sitters isn’t going to move the economic needle enough. The F35 is built in practically every state for a reason after all. Any future of SOF needs to take this harsh economic reality into account. Congress is okay making bespoke products like F35s, aircraft carriers, or even M1A1 tanks, as long as it means jobs in their districts.

Everyone else needs to get to work. It wasn’t congress that made all the SOF tribes interchangeable. The GWOT deployed MARSOC, SEALs, and SF as the same thing because SOCOM told them they were. Because when combat breaks out, it’s real hard to justify any resources just sitting on the shelf.

Several people have pushed back on my assertion that the army won’t disperse SF across the globe (Note #11), often arguing that the Army already does this for FAOs. Well, if you want SF to be a force 1/5 its current size and just a single Group, that might be your solution. I know I said smaller, but I was thinking that tiny (Note #2).

Time costs its own money. ‘Freefall for all’ died more from the time cost than the significant TDY costs. Same went for the RSEs. I recall sitting down with a GB tasked with drawing up a proposed RSE Training timeline. When he’d finished his draft, I pointed out to him, ‘That’ll take four years.’ The Army’s not going to buy off on spending an election cycle to make a single operator. They barely have the patience to produce 18Ds and pilots in half that time.

Whatever we decide to train the GBs to be, we need to keep in mind the economic reality: we will only have so much time and so much money to train with. We need to punch above our weight as long as we aren’t bringing jobs.

#15: SF DOESN’T NEED BIG ARMY TRUCKS.

In at least five motorpools across the country a fleet of trucks sits idle. Only occasionally do any of the trucks get driven. They get deployed even less.

And yet SF groups spend hundreds of man hours PMCSing them and millions of dollars maintaining them. Meanwhile, you won’t find a fleet of JLTVs in Taiwan, or the First Island Chain for that matter. They aren’t being used by 10th in Europe either. I’ve yet to hear of a 7th group SFODA using one in central or south America.

These vehicles are a CENTCOM only need that’s been dispersed across all five groups because once we all were using them in CENTCOM, regardless of their utility — my RG33s were just fixed point turrets at the VSO site I lived in, where a cheap Chinese motorcycle or an ATV was the preferred way to get around.

As I laid out in my last note (#14) the groups need money to afford change. We’re going to have to find time and cash to cover any change. Our irrelevant army vehicle fleet is a great place to start. Better to have a motorpool of Toyota Hiluxes — or better yet, a fleet of Kei trucks.

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I was supposed to draft a piece this week about Jennifer Pahlka’s brilliant Substack post on ‘A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform’. The post coincided with a quote from a strategist friend of mine, and Pahlka’s ‘Future state’ vs. ‘Status quo’ paradigm is the perfect lens to leverage.

But then fellow army officer Ned Marsh went and published his two-part piece in the Irregular Warfare Institute (IWI) (Part one, and two).1

The article, which argues Green Berets (GB) have lost their way, has kicked up a significant buzz, and garnered a flurry of replies. Thus, my system reform article is going to have to wait. If Special Forces (SF) insider baseball isn’t your interest, you’ll need to wait for my next post.2 But if GB on GB violence is your jam, read on.

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I guess we’re gonna do this…

This post is not going to be a take-down piece of Ned’s argument.

There are already others who’ve posted their own thoughts, with solid arguments. Retired commander Dave Maxwell posted his piece on the reborn Small Wars Journal. While I don’t share his particular focus with definitions, I do think he’s right to highlight the need for any reform to preserve the SF identity. Retired chief Maurice Duclos got IWI to run his rebuttal. He is right to highlight the criticality of our partner, but his belief that the army is going to PCS small units to foreign countries is off. I personally think Justin McIntosh has the best take on his Substack. He highlights that Ned’s original argument is undermined by strategic policy set by political leaders, not by anyone in uniform, regardless of headgear.

All these authors echo arguments made by Ed Croot in his 2020 piece (written while he was a student at Duke and later published by JSOU). Ed Croot argued the SF Regiment had been a ship without an oar over twenty years of GWOT, buffeted by storms and waves determined to take us off onto wherever their course wanted.

This was the article that Gordon Richmond researched as part of his piece last fall calling for the SF regiment to take on the call for introspection and direction. Gordon found the regiment has faced identify crises before. In fact the current argument is endemic to our branch:

Identity debates seem to surface cyclically after major strategic shifts. Leaders should view them not as aberrations but as predictable inflection points, moments that deserve doctrinal clarity and conscious stewardship.

The ‘Silent Professionals’ at SW

Gordon ran his original piece in Special Warfare (SW), where it sticks out as one of the few journalistic pieces in a decade of little more than fluff. There were even years when SW didn’t publish anything at all.

At the same time, the conversations inside the branch have been underwhelming. Marsh may decry how Lieutenant General Cleveland’s ARSOF 2022 was ‘filed and forgotten’, but ARSOF 2030 never event warranted being forgotten. It was vapid, and so it was just ignored.3

For years, the real SF regimental conversations have been elsewhere. Gordon found them on LinkedIn, podcasts, and professional writing venues. Both Gordon and Zachary Griffiths, the originator of the army-wide Harding Project, have been trying for years to transform SW back into a real branch journal. Candidly, I have mostly rolled my eyes at their efforts.

Thus far SW hasn’t shown any interest in the SF debate. They haven’t acknowledged Marsh yet, while plenty of other venues have published responses. While SW journal has resumed posting after their hiatus, few of the articles seem to have caught hold of the regiment.

For context, look at last week’s Harding Project. Their ‘Friday Formation’ provides a list of the week’s most impactful articles from across the army. It lists over a half-dozen different venues: Small Wars Journal, Modern War Institute, Army Press, The NCO Journal, War on the Rocks, Mops and Moes, From the Green Notebook, a smattering of Army journals, and of course, IWI. What’s not featured? A single article from SW.

Today our military is undergoing an inflection point which is not SF unique. Tankers are talking amongst themselves about what cheap strike means to their branch. Aviators are fighting to keep pilots in helicopters after their neglect of drones has found them unprepared and possibly irrelevant. Air Defenders find themselves suddenly back in vogue, which unfortunately includes threats to their large immobile radars.

GWOT is behind us, and today conflict like Epic Fury have one undeniable lesson for all the army’s branches: We need to figure out a new way to fight. SF should be designing its own way forward and SW is the perfect venue to host it.

On Beards and Boards

For the SF branch, Gordon’s post from last fall has a great ‘ beard’ paradigm.

• White Beards: the earliest generation, who spent the bulk of their active careers before 9/11.

• Gray Beards: spent pre-9/11 as junior enlisted or company-grade officers.

• Black Beards: came of age during the GWOT, which defined their careers.

• Beardless: Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Syria played only fleeting, if any, roles in their careers.4

Of all the authors I listed above, almost all of them are white beards (Maxwell) or grey beards (Duclos, McIntosh, Croot).5 Croot at least wrote while he was serving, but the only active serving GB who has taken on the future of our regiment is Gordon.

I’m not besmirching the white and grey beards. I thoroughly enjoyed debating over coffee with a grey beard last week. These former solders are as critical to keeping the history of our regiment as they are to helping us find our way forward.

SW should be the ship’s pilot that steers us toward the future.

I don’t use the ship metaphor lightly. While in Okinawa, one of the better PDs I ran discussed how the ‘Ship of Theseus’ helped us define our battalion. The philosophical dilemma is ideal for this very moment. Old planks and aged sails (white beards) have been replaced with new ones (beardless). Our former captains (Grey beards) have gone ashore, never to return to sea, leaving it to the latest generation of GBs (black beards) to chart our way ahead. The SF ship still must sail.

But SW is not currently captaining the ship. They have not responded to multiple calls to chart a way ahead. White and grey beards are doing more for the regiment than SW is. But the retirees can only do so much. The real work has pass to aged ‘black beards’ like Gordon, Zach, and I, and to the newest ‘beardless’. We are the current ship’s crew, though admittedly Gordon and I are outside the USASOC tribe. Perhaps that’s a feature?6

Taking the Helm

Do I have thoughts on Marsh’s post? Plenty.

Do I have ideas on what a SF way head should and should not include? Over a dozen.

I’ve also got notes on Maxwell’s, Duc’s, Richmond’s, McIntosh’s, and even Croot’s arguments. But as I said, this post is not going to do that. Instead, I’ll share those ideas as Substack Notes separately. The goal is as much to persistently thump the regiment to do something as it is to keep the focus of this post where it should be: SW magazine.

I still think SW is the ideal venue to keep the regiment talking and listening to itself. The magazine can choose to take on this role or remain relegated to little more than SF Group bathroom reading. That’s for the magazine to decide.

But regardless, the SF Regiment needs to have this debate. A ‘black beard’ needs to kybernetes this shit. We need to involve all the ‘beards,’ and this challenge cannot be solved in a single weekend at Fort Bragg.

Some of the conversations likely need to take place on SIPR. Unfortunately, despite the army giving me SIPR teams two years ago, SOCOM still hasn’t managed to figure it out. Whatever the solution, we need a space like Think, Drink, Write, Fight on a secure network to share the latest AARs and TTPs.7

Word is SWC is getting a new commander.8 Might be the perfect easy win for him to take on.

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2

‘Special Forces’ are a branch in the Army. They are not ‘Special Operations Forces’ which is an umbrella term for all special military units under SOCOM. This tiny difference is why you can easily find articles falsely describing Navy SEALs as ‘Special Forces’. Is it pedantic?

Collectively, we wasted the first two years of the Ukraine War doing nothing. Our leaders dismissed the impact of drones on the battlefield. I sat in courses for future battalion and brigade command teams where the army’s senior most four-star generals told the assembled leaders we shouldn’t bother with lessons from ‘two bad armies fighting’ because ‘our tanks drive fast’.1

Since 2024, the inescapability of drones has forced some pundits to change their sentiment, if only a little. Voices now acknowledge the tech has changed, but say the US shouldn’t change the way we fight on such flash in the pan technologies, often because it doesn’t work with our current preferred way of fighting.2 One novel, if suspect, WoTR post likens today’s drones to history’s horse cavalry, proposing professional infantry as the solution to both. Even if you ignore whole chapters historians Azar Gat and Ian Morris wrote on the impact of horse cavalry — which I may be willing to excuse someone not knowing — and the entire history of non-western cavalryman — which I won’t, the author’s diagnosis is wrong.

This is because the drones aren’t the real problem. They’re a symptom. The real, inescapable problem is precision death has gotten cheap.

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When Killing Gets Cheap

We have had drones and precision strike capabilities since the First Gulf War. Every single veteran of two-decades of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan knows about drones. We know precision strike even better. Arguably it’s what won us the First Gulf War (1991). On the low end, a Hellfire missile costs just $150,000. To the US these munitions were so cheap we used to fire multiples at the same flip-flop wearing ISIS terrorist. My JOC used to tally the number of college tuitions it took to kill a single terrorist.

That arrogance and indifference to price changed a decade ago, but the US has been ignoring it, at our peril. This is because in the last decade killing me went from unfathomably expensive to so cheap it doesn’t make sense to not to try.

I’ve previously detailed how all the inputs to precision sense and strike have plunged in the decades I’ve been alive. GPS devices of the 1980s weighed twenty pounds and cost as much as a one-bedroom house. Today they are so cheap and infinitesimally light we put them in everything: phones, watches, even dog collars. Cameras, once major household expenses, are so cheap today most cell phones have half a dozen of them. Both night and thermal vision used to be considered military technology just a few decades ago. Now you can buy them at any home improvement store. Even spectrum analyzers and LIDAR have reduced to affordable weight and price points.

Engineers can argue what the acronym stands for, but SWAP generally means the size, weight, and power of a system.3 There are still trade-offs between the various legs, but across the board the weight and monetary cost have shrunk precipitously.

Once thought of as the refuge of the asymmetric fighter, every state worth its salt today is leveraging miniscule monitors to find and hit their opponents.4 This is the minimum buy-in of any conflict. Twenty years ago, even hitting a tank with a Tomahawk didn’t make economic sense. Today, no infantry company can afford to be unprepared for how cheap it is actively working to kill them.

A Stolen March

The west, and the US in particular have ignored today’s economics of conflict. Nearly all our major platforms started rolling off assembly lines over fifty years ago. Our tactics haven’t changed much in the same time span either.

Meanwhile, our adversaries spent the last decade doing everything they could to plug-and-play their way through dozens of iterations, always making sensing and striking bespoke forces ever cheaper. Military technology has always been subject to the Red Queen Effect, but today’s relentless innovation race outstrips anything the US military primes are accustomed to. Mayflies have longer lifespans than some of the forms we have seen iterated in Ukraine. There is no sign of this economic process is slowing down. Because it is powered by economics, not tech.

Today ranges have grown longer and longer, from 10km through 70km, to some as far as 1,500km. At the same time human and computer vision are not providing last meter guidance. Both are finding novel ways to ignore EW and GPS jamming.

The same technologies that came together at a cut-rate price and fractional weight to bring you the iPhone are now upending the rules of mass on the battlefield. Small price advantages, when compounded across thousands of sensors and strikes, produce strategic effects that neither tactical brilliance nor simple maneuver can ignore.

If anything, the economics are accelerating tech innovation into even more dimensions. Having already taken over the world, on land, in the sea, and in the air, agentic AI and cheap satellites are bringing the threat into the remaining two war-fighting domains. Do not get fooled by the competition for expensive premier AI models. For a narrow purpose, you can train and host your own AI model on a laptop. AI is improving every week, and it will never be less capable tomorrow.

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What Iran lays bare

We have squandered five years ignoring the impacts of cheap sense and strike. We could have learned from Ukraine, but too many of our leaders willfully ignored their lessons. Any general today who argues maneuver warfare will solve all our problems is echoing the same blind faith in red pants and élan as the French generals of the First World War.

Indeed, the First World War has other rhymes with today. The lessons of both the Boer and the Sino-Japanese Wars were dismissed with the same arrogance as today’s lessons learned in Ukraine and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. For years, the US military has struggled to stymie the Houthi rebels in Yemen with “Birkin bag” munitions made by our defense primes. We have spent two years slinging Ferraris at lawnmowers, burning through billions of dollars of hard to replace inventory. At the same time, the Houthi’s managed to turn a profit.

Iran is not Ukraine. Yet we see a similar economic challenge today with Iran. Militaries in the region have mostly managed the ballistic missile threat, but allies across the board are struggling to adapt to Iran’s cheap strike platform, one we have known about for a decade.

Only the US has not prioritized cheap munitions for several decades. The US Navy surface ships today lack guns. The USAF lost one of only 16 AWACS E-3 aircraft after it naively parked it on a runway that had already been struck twice earlier that week.5

The army is little better, championing two-kilometer ranges of cheap drones when the real range starts at over 30km in Ukraine. Both the Arab states and the West have been forced to ask the Ukrainians for their experience. Thankfully, they have offered their help.

We need to change more than the way we fight; we need to transform the way we build and task-organize.

Deception is no longer optional. Too often deception plans have been left to higher headquarters to devise. On today’s battlefield units must carry their own decoys. Multiplies. If your radar cannot move, then you need one hell of an extensive plan to keep it from being struck. Good fucking-luck. It is simply too cheap to find and strike a target today for any force to rely on exquisite ‘Birkin bags’ that cannot quickly reposition.

Launch sites in Iran can extend as far as 1,500 km from their target. Essentially every major US base in the region is within this range. Whinging about Russia and China providing cheap satellite images to Iran is absurd. Aside from that being exactly what conflict has always been about, many of the coverage they want is commercially available. We are idiots for not changing the way we fight.

Combined arms maneuver is still a great way to fight, but it relies on air superiority and secure staging points to fight from. Iran has laid bare what we have ignored for a long time — you rent air superiority, not own it. Below 10k feet, you can barely even rent it. We haven’t started to come to terms with the math challenges of not being able to keep our logistics within 70km of the front for long. Gas and ammo have always been great targets for assholes like me, because both already explode.

We haven’t done anything because we still treat cheap drones like expensive high-end platforms. We need to think of them bullets. The implications of drones as consumables are a series of tough questions about procurement, storage, recycling, and industrial capacity. How are they Expended? Recycled? Army officers Zachary Griffiths and Jeff Ivas made a start, but we need to be aggressively exploring this space.

Countering cheap strikes will require equally cheap methods. Ukraine has mastered layered detection (with cheap sensors) while striking drones with drones or other cheap munitions. The US needs to catch up. We’re already at least half-a-decade behind.

‘It’s the economy, stupid.’

Mick Ryan gets it. Justin Mc gets it. The ladies of Sirens get it.

The Economist definitely gets it. Shashank Joshi, The Economist’s defense editor recently laid the challenge bare.

“…the argument was essentially the technologies of sensors, so drones, satellite, things like that, combined with cheap precision strike weapons were tilting the battlefield away from the people trying to hide on the ground and towards the finders and had a more lethal battlefield. What we’ve seen in Ukraine is the extreme validation of that concept.”

Joshi goes on to discuss the resurfacing of other cheap tactics and technologies, and the rise of commercial actors in war. All of these are challenges the US military, not known for its understanding of economics, must engage with. The US would do well to adopt something similar to Ukraine’s “Moneyball” approach to killing. At the minimum it must begin to adapt to a world where cheap sense and strike are the table stakes of any conflict.

Economic efficiency is an old hand at driving changes to war’s character. It’s responsible for more new tactics than doctrine. Because commanders can choose tactics, but they cannot choose the underlying economics. It is economics which decided not just by what a military can do, but what it can afford to do repeatedly.

The oft lauded German Panzer tank provides just one historical example. The Panzer of the second World War might have been an objectively better tank, but the Allies could produce four times as many subpar tanks which did the job. The US used to be experts in the economics of war. We didn’t beat the USSR with the triad or our tanks. We did it by judoing their economy.

Unfortunately, today we need China to manufacture the weapons we need to fight China. Think the logistics of the Straits of Hormuz are tricky? Try the first island chain where every airfield, every tank farm and depot, every motor-pool are already imaged and inventoried. Try a battlefield where it takes longer to upload an updated image than it takes an AI to identify what’s different.

Swarms are coming too. We humans haven’t solved the problems yet, but we’re getting better every day. And we know it’s a solvable problem — nature has already done it over and over, for a much lower SWAP than anything we’re currently trying.

We need to adapt to an economic reality where killing comes off the shelf and you don’t need a prime to do it.

‘War Never Changes’

The nature of war is still brutish, a violent contest for the will of the people. What cheap sense and strike has done is forever change war’s character.6 Regardless, the Red Queens always gets her races.

Focusing exclusively on the drones themselves will not get us where we need to go. Cheap drones are not, after all, poised to replace humans on the battlefield. Dr. Jack Watling found the logistics tail alone for these new tools absorbs most of the manpower savings. Nor have cheap drones provided the range and power of capital ships. We will still have a use for high end, bespoke weapon systems. Cheap drones do not replace submarines, tanks, or SM6 missile interceptors. They complicate combined arms. They also complicate the fuck out of it. Cheap sense and strike are about exploiting the same seam fast fashion outlets like Temu and Shien leverage. They do not seek to replace high end Gucci bands — they ignore them.

Obsessing over drones leads us to unhelpfully stockpiling cheap drones. The tech is sure to move on before we use them. Designs today critically need modability built in. We need to be able to plug and play different sensors, controls, and even munitions in a way no current weapon system does. Our training and education need to refocus on underlying concepts and the means of production. We don’t need nearly as many people trained on any specific platform. We need people trained on the “theory of drone” who can adapt whatever tools are at hand for tomorrow’s fight.

The economics that gave us cheap drones means we must change the way we fight. But the first thing we need to do is acknowledge the shift. Any argument which claims cheap sense and strike has not altered the character of war is incomplete if it ignores this underlying economic reality. We have already ceded the initiative and years of critical time we need. Failure to adapt to the economics of cheap sense and strike risks is how we ended up in a world of strategic surprise, failing fast on the contemporary battlefield.

The cost of ignoring cheap sense and strike is simply too high.

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5

You really need to listen to the ChinaTalk, Now WarTalk podcast. This one is well worth a listen, if only for phenomenal song at the end: ‘It’ll buff out.’ Also, a hat tip for Justin Mc’s phenomenal Substack ‘Mind of Things’.

Mind of Things

Retired Special Forces soldier’s thoughts on defense, technology, parenting, and other things that catch my interest. Occasionally, I have guest writers on.

By Justin Mc

My name is Erik and I’m a firefighting arsonist.

I presume most Downrange Data readers come to this Substack looking for answers, or at a minimum, novel ideas. I hope across the more than 98 posts many of you have found the insight you were looking for, or at a minimum a rhyming voice of frustration.1

Today’s not one of those posts where I know better. Today’s a post where I come clean about my own failings and ask for your help.

This all started last fall when my good friend and co-author Nicholas Frazier told me to check out his MIT professor’s book.

Nelson P. Repenning, Donald C. Kieffer There's Got to Be a Better Way

Right from the introduction, the book was calling me out, in detail.

The authors described how organizations call in their supposed best project managers to right a sinking ship, handing over the reins to people who have a knack for getting things done under pressure. Those who can circumvent processes and make magic happen. Except these firefighting arsonists are actually inhibiting the firm’s ability to grow and compete, because they aren’t fixing the process; they’re going around it. Too many of these sorts of pyros can cripple firms as they hire and promote the best firefighting arsonists over real change agents.

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Anyone who’s served with me for a month has heard me decry the army for doing the exact same thing. I’ve described it as our tactical corgi problem: the military obsessively cultivates us to be tactical thinkers over our careers, meticulously turning out shortsighted tacticians who can solve immediate problems. Then suddenly at the Senior Service College they ask these stubby-legged fluffs to be strategic thinkers and find most of us can’t make the turn. After twenty years they want the long legs and foresight of Great Danes, but that’s not the traits they selected for.

Reppening and Kiefer are correct, of course. My firefighting skills are certainly a large part of how I made Colonel. Their book details how the real need is to attack the overall process that’s not performing. Anything less is at best a temporary fix, and at worst so damaging to the system itself that it has to be cut out like quick-clot. Sure, it stops the bleeding, but that’s only the solution in a crisis.

I can’t dispute Reppening’s and Kiefer’s critique. Any regular reader will know the myriad ways I bypassed the systems of record to get the job done. They worked in that moment, but I’m uncertain what happened after I left. This is a critical problem.

‘I think maintenance is the Achilles heel of soldier-developed projects,’ my fellow commander Zach Griffiths once reminded me. Zach’s not much of a firefighting arsonist, largely because he’s better at process building. He’s the reason the army has The Harding Project. Zach didn’t bypass the system like me. He went straight to the Chief of Staff of the Army and told him this was worth investing in.

Harding Project Substack

The Harding Project: A Re-Introduction

In 1934, the Army raced to transform itself for the next war. The Great Depression, surplus equipment from World War I, and limited manning challenged the Army. Knowing his branch would need to think harder, the Chief of Infantry appointed then-Major…

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2 years ago · 24 likes · 5 comments · Zachary Griffiths and Leyton Summerlin

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Stormking Analytics has a recent piece where they give me a more flattering name than firefighting arsonist. To them I’m an operational leader.

Storm King Analytics

Why Subordinate Organizations Keep Building Excel Trackers

In the last three posts, we argued that teaching visualization tools first creates fragile systems, that authoritative data is not a dashboard decision, and that powerful platforms cannot resolve decisions leaders refuse to make…

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4 months ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Storm King Analytics

Their piece details why the army has a dozen systems of record, all of which are dwarfed by literally thousands of Excel spreadsheets. I’ve had to listen to more than one KM lecture me that Excel is not a database. Well, in a world where you don’t have real-time access to a database, or where you need to connect multiple databases together to get an answer, Excel is the default tool.

Let’s start with asynchronous connections. My co-author had a great example of why the rest of the world forgets how inimical this is to military ops. He was meeting with Palantir to try and fix their system. He tried to explain the critical need to access at least some of the data while disconnected. When the Palantir rep asked, ‘Why would you disconnect from the internet?’, Nick realized he needed to start their entire conversation over again.

Excel isn’t just the real-time problem mitigation. It’s the go to solution for a lot of my problems. Stormking Analytics provides what might as well be athe most flattering definition of firefighting arsonist:

‘Excel is not chosen because it is elegant or ideal. It is chosen because it is available, flexible, and locally controllable. A spreadsheet can be built in minutes, adjusted in real time, and tailored to a specific problem without waiting for a development cycle or governance review.’

Excel, or more specifically, CSV is the lingua franca of the army’s true data corps. It’s the only way to get data to move and dance the way we need it to. Want proof? Download your data from any database, even Substack. Guess what? It’s coming in CSV.

I’m not a firefighting arsonist because I want to be, but because fixing the military systems isn’t within my control. Soldiers don’t have the ability to edit and update, so we become firefighting arsonists in the gap, and our CSVs / Excel spreadsheets proliferate. I’m not alone. Jennifer Pahlka’s organization Recoding America is trying hard to fix our bloated systems, but she time and again finds the same problems.2

​As a garrison commander, I’ve been able to gain access to a lot of the databases that the army already has. But, none of them touch. I had hopes for the new Vantage AI and database system; but thus far I haven’t been able to self-learn my way through it. When our recent Senior Leader Forum introduced an FA59 who knew the program, I quickly asked him who our rep for Vantage was.3 Crickets.

Stormking Analytics recently posted an article listing organizations’ use of AI across a hierarchy.

Storm King Analytics

Everyone’s Using AI. Almost Nobody’s Using It Institutionally.

This is not a research report. It is an observation, the kind that accumulates when you spend enough time working alongside organizations that are genuinely trying to figure out what to do with AI. What follows is a pattern we keep encountering across sectors and organization types, and it is worth naming clearly…

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3 months ago · 1 like · Storm King Analytics

Stormking described how most organizations are not using true AI at a tier three level.

My org is not currently using AI at scale at all. We are not even in first tier. We are at 0.

Which brings me back to Reppening’s and Kiefer’s book. A lot of different author’s fixes are focused on tech solutions. Mine certainly have been. But the book’s authors highlight the real problem is tracking the flows of information and putting the right people in the right place to make decisions. Reppening and Kieffer term this ‘making the invisible visible’.

David Epstein found somthing simialr when writing his most recent book.

Range Widely

How To Improve Your Information Diet

Before I get to a reader question this week, I want to share a short excerpt from Inside the Box that I think is relevant…

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3 months ago · 139 likes · 24 comments · David Epstein

Epstein cites a cutting-edge genomics lab who solved their organizational problem by actually drawing a funnel and mapping how everything fit into it. Once they could actually physically see the inputs, the answer to their challenges was obvious.

Which leaves me where I currently am. I know the army has databases of information which, if I link them up, can answer easy math problems. I need to get those systems to talk to each other without needing me to re-download the CSVs every time. But I also need to see the workloads people around me are actually carrying, so we can look at how to actually fix the broken systems around us instead of just sprinting around them.

If you have any Vantage experience or expertise in the latter hit me up in a DM. Because right now the only tools I have are CSVs and a lighter.

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If I asked you when you were the fittest in your life, what would your answer be? I stumbled into this question last week, and my answer surprised me.1

What’s a Combat Field Test (CFT)?

At the end of March, the Secretary of the Army published an update to the army’s Physical Fitness Standards, Army Directive 2026-XC. Regular Downrange Data readers will recall a year ago in the spring of 2025 the army published EXORD 218-25 which reclassified two dozen jobs as ‘Combat MOSs’, challenging them with higher fitness standards.

Secretary Driscoll’s latest directive implements guidance from Secretary Hegseth pushed out at the end of fiscal year. The army made two small changes and one larger one. Three MOSs were added to the list: 12D (Army Divers), and 89D and 89E (Explosive Ordinance Disposal —EOD — NCOs and officers). The other small change was all evaluation reports will now include actual AFT scores, not just pass / fail like they used to. The larger change is the Combat Field Test (CFT). This new test now replaces one of the biannual AFTs. Passing one has no impact on passing the other — combat MOSs will need to pass both.

What’s in a CFT? Well, I didn’t know until last Friday. The policy went out Monday 30 March, I first read it on Instagram on Wednesday, and then on Thursday afternoon I found out the headquarters across the street was going to run one the following morning. And that’s how early Friday, after finishing my originally programmed deadlifts, I went outside to find out.

Candidly, the test is kind of fun. Or at least I had fun.

The CFT consists of seven sequential events completed as fast as possible (AFAP).

• 1 mile run

• 100m sprint

• 30 dead-stop push-ups

• 16x 40# sandbag lifts up to a 65” platform

• 50m water-can carry (2x 40#s)

• 25m high crawl then 25m 3-5 second rush

• 1 mile run

It’s a pass / fail test, so it’s not like the AFT where you must score a certain number of points in each event. The CFT is one set as fast as possible (AFAP), testing your ability to complete all the movements under a single time standard. The test is taken in boots and combat uniform — ‘boots and utes’ (shirt, top and bottom, but no hat).2

The runs are, well runs. You all already know that doesn’t spark joy in my heart.

But you know what does? CLEANS! Specifically sandbag clean-and-jerks. Sandbags are a great replacement for the now deceased standing power throw — aka overhead yeet.3 Now we can assess soldier’s clean power, but instead of a single max effort over the back blind throw — which, to be clear, again, NO ONE DOES — the test is a much more realistic clean and jerk motion. Forty pounds isn’t a ton of weight, but it’s about the heaviest thing you’d want to clean up to your head-height without instead getting a friend to help you. The day of my test we had eight sandbags and a rope at 65” off the ground. You ran up, cleaned all eight sandbags over the rope, then cleaned them back across.

The rest of the test should be fairly familiar. ‘Dead stop’ push-ups are just real hand release push-ups. Unlike the Ts we do in the AFT, you only lift your hands off the ground at the bottom of each rep, hyper extending your shoulders. They’re harder than the Ts, but not that big a deal. The water-can carry is the same weight and distance as the AFT, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone. The only movement that wasn’t a regular part of my workouts was the high-crawl, but it came back pretty quickly. Three-to-five second rushes are just running with burpees, which I do a lot.

The army hasn’t yet published the standards for the CFT, but I got a 19:30 on my first effort. We’ll see how that shakes out. For what it’s worth, I got a 19:44 on Fat Thor with Extra Guac, which is the full AFT AFAP at the 90-point standard — 90 points means you don’t have to get taped for body fat, hence ‘Fat Thor’. Given a lot of the two tests are the same and they share that AFAP format, it’s probably not too surprising they take about the same time.

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How my fitness changed over my career

I shared my thoughts on the CFT over the weekend with some veteran buddies from Ar Ramadi, both in and out of service. One asked me:

So what’s the point of a CFT? Seriously. Like, I know PT sucked 20 years ago and the APFT was ‘meh’ but what problem are we actually solving here? I just wonder if anyone ever says “you know, whatever went wrong in Iraq or Afghanistan, it wasn’t because our soldiers were doing the APFT.” Similarly: “you know that Army that won desert storm? A huge number of them wouldn’t meet modern enlistment or commissioning requirements… I rather doubt whether I could have met these “modern” PT standards when I was younger (then again, had I been lifting weights back then and eating better, who knows?). But I know that I had no problem actually performing in, you know, combat. Really makes me wonder how many “combat capable” soldiers we’re losing.

First, I’m not sure these new standards are actually costing us any soldiers. I echoed my friends concerns when I wrote about the change last year, but thus far, I am unaware of a single soldier who’s been forced to switch MOSs.4

But my friend’s comment about ‘lifting weights… and eating better’ caught my attention. I found the CFT events — both individually and together — very manageable at 45. But I think 22-year-old Erik would have struggled more.

When I joined ROTC in 1999, I was coming off a decade of competitive swimming. While I wasn’t fast enough to swim Division 1, I walked into the army with the exact fitness leaders used to expect - I was a gazelle who could run for days. Maxing the two-mile run took little additional effort. At no point in my entire army career have I not maxed the sit-ups.5 I had to train up on push-ups some, but that came quick. According to almost every senior leader in the Army, I was fit.

However, walking around in my kit all day in Ramadi wore me out. I could ruck OK, but not well. This makes sense when you remember you’ve never seen a gazelle carry much. Light and lean, but not much mass.

This is, sadly, the same fitness I still see most units getting after today in the army. As I lapped around the track for the CFT, I got to watch the weird ballet of bullshit that most soldiers were doing. Their programming is still focused on long slow runs and bodyweight movements with no additional weight.

Back in 2005, when I got back from that first combat deployment, I started training for Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS), getting into ruck shape. I still ran plenty, and did some other general calisthenics, but mostly I rucked. A lot. I was typically carrying heavier packs than I needed to train with, but wear and tear on my back and hips was a future Erik problem, and I wasn’t really expecting to live to see 30, so…

By the end of the Q course I was probably in the best ruck shape of my life, even better than the end of Ranger School. SFAS was the start of a year that saw ever heavier rucks carried over longer distances, culminating with Robin Sage where my ruck was so heavy that on infil I didn’t so much jump out of the plane as get dragged out of it. Over those eighteen months I developed the shoulders, legs, and core to carry a #135 ruck over a 10k woodland infil without really noticing.

But aside from selection events, I have almost never been called upon to actually carry loads that heavy that far. Our assessment and training were about finding our limits for the worst day, but the CFT is focused on what a normal day for a combat soldier could look like.

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My training changed most dramatically in late 2007 when a fellow officer invited me to a CrossFit gym he had been going to. I never became a full convert, but the focus on lifting weights and functional movements became foundational to the training I still do today.6 I could feel the difference in my 2008 deployment, and even more so in 2010 in Afghanistan. My core strength carried my kit better and my heart was able to better handle the short bursts of high intensity I found myself in.

The Q course was the first time I encountered peers using steroids. There were a handful of guys who were on team ‘Pecs and pipes’ as we called them. These guys were trying to get yoked, and they did. But I watched them go down in the endurance events. Most of that steroids crowd went out the window after an Afghanistan trip, with the exception of those who only did commando fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) missions. Living in the valley at elevation and constantly going up and down, you quickly started cutting every ounce of weight you didn’t need. Once you shed all the nice-to-have but not necessary kit you’d brought, muscles for show were the next thing shed.

While I was smart enough not to indulge in steroids, I still had a lot to learn about fitness as a young captain. I mostly substituted raw power in lieu of good technique. When I came back to group as a Major after grad school in 2014, I embarked on the period where I set most of my lifting PRs. I could tell I wasn’t as ‘strong’ as I was when I was a CPT, but my technique was dramatically improved. I ran my first marathon in 2017, but my principal focus was on one-rep maxes (1RM) for deadlift, clean and jerk, and snatches. However, I was also getting hurt at least 2-3 times a year, usually torquing something while pursuing a 1RM.

The last major change to my fitness programming came in 2021, when my physical therapist got me to stop treating my mobility as an afterthought.

Since then, my injuries have dwindled to minor ones, maybe once a year. Nothing that keeps me out of the gym, just areas demanding more focused maintenance.

With this foundation of lifting and functional movements, I’ve found I’m ready for whatever gets thrown at me, like when the CFT was sprung on me with only half a day’s warning. I’m not #1 in anything, but I can do just about anything I get asked. Despite not running, I can still run the two-mile just fine, much to the chagrin of people who run a lot more. I even get PRs sporadically throughout my year, despite being 45.

This may seem an ironic definition of ‘fitness’, but it’s the same mistake people make when they misread Darwin’s theory of evolution. ‘Fittest’ doesn’t mean ‘strongest’. It means most capable of adapting to one’s environment, especially when it changes.

20-year-old me had energy but lacked proper training. I was highly specialized, which also means poor at adaptation. I was a lithe little runner who couldn’t carry much weight.

30-year-old me had a lot of strength and functional fitness, but I was still injury prone. A lot of my fitness had outsized risks, and when I was injured, I was very not ready to do anything, never mind adapt.

40-year-old me has the foundational strength but is also smart enough to avoid injuries. I now know how to train and program. I’m ready for the unknown and can ‘no-paddle-drop-in’ on the CFT and come away thinking ‘those sandbag clean and jerks are fun’.

‘When I was fittest’ has changed based on the demands. But I’d have to say, right now might be the fittest I’ve ever been. I’d probably be ‘stronger’ with 20-year-old knees and a 30-year-old core, but stronger isn’t fitter.

Anyways, go check out the CFT. It’s a pretty good workout, as long as you don’t find sandbag clean and jerks triggering.7

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3

Remember when I said I’d never use the word ‘yeet again’?

6

I wrote about some of the key characteristics of bad dashboards last fall.

But for many of the army’s junior commanders, the chromatic assaults on the senses aren’t the worst part. The real struggle lies in getting beaten over the head via the ugly dashboards built on months old data, usually by a commander who is a data toddler. Masked by too many superfluous pie charts, a lot of the army’s dashboards are laden with dated and irrelevant data. While PowerBI — and now GenAI — are available across the DoD, we still aren’t holding our commanders to any data literacy standard. Giving these leaders a custom-built dashboard is like giving your third grader the keys to a Ferrari.

The recent push to leverage data has seen a big step forward with Vantage. Run by Palantir, Vantage attempts to stitch together the hundreds of isolated data sources across the army, a daunting challenge to be sure. They’re making some slow progress and rolling out dashboards to showcase their results. Rumors have popped up that the Pentagon is shifting from PowerPoint to Vantage for USR reports. Effecting this culture change must be daunting, and I am wholeheartedly in favor of the drive to leverage data and kill PowerPoint.

But we’re not there yet. We’re held back not just by data literacy, but by shoddy data systems with no APIs.1 While Vantage can pull all these threads into a single — albeit cluttered — pane of glass, it cannot write back to these databases.

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Laaaaaaaaaggggggg

When the data’s all siloed and there’s no APIs, you’re left with a dashboard littered with lagging data. Some of these lags are pretty egregious. MEDPROS, the system the Army uses to track our medical readiness, is perhaps the most egregious offender, often taking months to reflect updates. Which is absurd: In 1860 the Pony Express could be relied upon to take less than two weeks.

Across the army today, brigade and division commanders are beating up captains over Vantage dashboards that are showing months old data. These commanders are shooting well behind the duck, and don’t even realize it’s their own dashboards that’s causing the problem. And to be clear: when the dashboard sucks it’s the commander who is at fault.

In my combat deployments, we would often have drones stare at a target for days. This recce was the buy-in for lethal targeting when you’re doing everything you can to minimize unnecessary casualties.2 If our drone got pulled and we lost coverage we delayed our strike until we could regain a current sight picture of the objective.

This isn’t a unique rule to SOF. Even the conventional army wouldn’t choose to execute an operation off stale recce. No unit showing up to an NTC or JRTC rotation is going to conduct their attack based of the last rotation’s month-old recce. They’d all insist on getting their own recce out and getting a fresh picture of the battlefield. If they didn’t, we’d fire them.

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Data is your recce

Too few commanders are asking questions of their dashboards. They aren’t asking how the data was gathered, how often it’s being refreshed, or even if it’s the right data in the first place. Stormking Analytics has been dropping a series on the challenges of dashboards.

Storm King Analytics

Why Subordinate Organizations Keep Building Excel Trackers

In the last three posts, we argued that teaching visualization tools first creates fragile systems, that authoritative data is not a dashboard decision, and that powerful platforms cannot resolve decisions leaders refuse to make…

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4 months ago · 2 likes · Storm King Analytics

Their posts do a great job of challenging leaders to understand what dashboards do, and do not do. Dashboards won’t ‘Decide What You Won’t’. They ‘can show you where you disagree, but they cannot tell you how to agree’. Stormking’s series illustrates how ‘dashboard factories’ aren’t going to magically make your organization data literate, as well as explaining why your subordinates are still using excel instead of your dashboard to do their jobs.

Enterprise systems are built to deliver accuracy, standardization, and consistency at scale. Operational decision-support tools must prioritize timeliness, adaptability, and proximity to action. These are different design objectives, and each serves a distinct purpose. The mistake is assuming that enterprise data can serve both equally well. When leaders expect enterprise platforms to handle every operational need, teams either slow down or quietly build around them. In most environments, they choose the latter.

Stormking’s series is well worth a read. They highlight the same problem: leaders must own their data. They need to be intentional in what they want it to do for them. Today, our worst problem is often IPPS-A’s laggy data — and shoddy Ux. This leads to wasted staff and soldier churn as everyone fights to ‘make the slide green’ in a system that’s always days, weeks, and months behind. That time would better be spent getting ready.

Because we need to be getting ready. In our next fight, commanders will have to fight against adversaries actively trying to corrupt their data. Our adversaries are training right now to execute the same deceptions operations that have been the hallmark of great military campaigns since antiquity. Only now they’re working to deceive our sensors and infect our data streams.

Data is your recce. And just like when you push out scouts forward, you need to fight for it.

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2

It’s hard to pin down the origin of New Year’s Resolutions. Stories reach back across countries and cultures all the way to antiquity. Thousands of years ago merely returning borrowed farm equipment was seen as an honorable means to better oneself in the new year. Resolutions seem to be culturally agnostic, as all over the world people found the pivot point between the decline of winter and the rebirth of spring as an impetus to try and be better.

Of course, the tradition of promptly breaking one’s New Year’s Resolutions is certainly as old. We can take heart in the knowledge that much of our failure to keep our goals is just due to entropy. The same law of the universe which causes headphone cords to tangle is helping you failing at keeping your resolution. There are simply more ways to trip yourself up than to stick with your lofty goals.

But science has found a few tried and true methods to help turn your new hopes into habits. And since at least one poll says most American’s reported fitness as their the #1 goal for 2026, I think it’s a great lens to examine habit building

Step 1: Set Modest and Achievable Intermediate Goals.

It’s almost definitional that the first step to any new resolution is to figure out where you want to end up. But the end lives a long way away, especially when life starts getting in the way.

Change requires energy and time, and when you get busy and tired, both of those become harder to manifest.

Research suggests you can improve your chances by having goals, plural. Under your broad heading of ‘be more fit’ or ‘waste less time on social media’, it pays to have intermediary steps. What specific thing can you do to measure your progress? Intermediate goals help by giving you a closer quantifiable target to shoot for. ‘Be more fit’ is easy to say, but what concrete things do you want to improve? By how much?

For me, my year started with a simple fitness goal: Run up Red Hill.

Red Hill is not a big goal. It’s not ‘Climb Mount Everest’, or even ‘Accumulate the total elevation gain of climbing Mt Everest.’ Red Hill’s not even a big hill, only a hair over a 1,000’ ascent. I didn’t have any particularly compelling reason to do it. I wasn’t even going to be the first to run the hill; there is well worn trail right up the side to the ridgeline. I just wanted to see if I could shuffle my way up the trail without downshifting back into a walk. I knocked this one out on my first try in April. Box checked.

The Army gave me my next micro-goal the following month when it rolled out the new AFT standards and test. I needed to prove myself worthy of my MOS by completing the new test at the higher ‘combat standard’ by the end of July.1

Starting early at 0500 trying to mitigate some of the sweltering Honshu heat, my Command Sergeant Major (a tanker) and I both bested the standard in late July, maxing the scores for our age groups. Second box checked.

Which gave me my next goal. I noticed that I was only a couple push-ups and less than half a minute of plank away from getting the max score for a 22 year old. A 44 year old soldier getting a 22 year old’s max seemed too good a meme to pass up.

In November I managed to knock out two goals. The first was finally taking on Fat Thor With Extra Guac — a sprint through all five AFT events at the 90 point standard. I bested my goal of 22:04 — the 2 mile passing time for my age — completing all five events in 19:44. Then two weeks later I managed to score the maximum score in all five AFT events regardless of age. Check and check.

Four modest and achievable milestones, each spaced a few months apart as pace beads to motivate myself and track my progress throughout the year. If you want to translate your new year’s resolution into a new you, break yours up into these bite sized chunks. You’ll find it easier to keep the motivation going.

And avoid taking too big a bite right at the outset. When fitness is your goal, that means literally making microtears in your muscles. This is why we get sore. Taking on too much too early is going to require a longer recovery, which works counter to making new habits. Stick with modest steps that accumulate throughout the year.

Step 2: Clear away the 3’ Walls.

A ‘3-foot wall’ is a hurdle so small you could almost trip over it, yet it still stands in your way. An easily surmountable hurdle in our life that inhibits action. You can see right over them. Hell, you can basically just fall over them if leaning hard enough. And yet…

This is why ‘Run up Red Hill’ was such a great first goal. My neighborhood was built around it. I didn’t need to get in the car, buy any new equipment, or even rearrange my schedule. I just had to jog to the end of my street and then start the plod up that trail. This left me without much of an excuse not to do it, which is a huge part of why I did actually do it — in particular given my distaste for running.

David Epstein shared another 3’ wall clearing tip on his Substack:

Going to sleep in workout clothes. It is remarkable how effective that has been in getting me to run or lift first thing in the morning. Somehow, my brain just says: “Look, you’re already dressed, are you really going to change out of running clothes? No. Let’s get after it.” A little weird? Maybe. Working for me? Definitely. Make it easy to make it easy.

Range Widely

2025 Year-End Awards

After a one-year hiatus, the extremely world famous Range Widely year-end awards are back by popular demand. (Ok, one reader asked for them, but he comments thoughtfully on nearly every post so he gets what he wants…

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6 months ago · 92 likes · 29 comments · David Epstein

Stale workouts and repetitiveness can be another 3’ wall. Part of what drove me away from Army PT was the monotony of push-ups, sit-ups, then run — every single day. Instead, leverage surprise and serendipity to boost your habit building. While dropping into the gym with no plan can work counter to a habit of fitness, knowing your workout in advance can be its own burden.

As a compromise, I do my programming fortnightly.2 This gives me enough time to ensure the workouts are responsive to my health and schedule, but far enough out that I often forget what’s in store until I open up my phone at the gym — I almost never look at the workout until I’m at the gym, because why build your own 3’ wall?

When you’re looking at your goals, take the time to look for the 3’ walls around them. Then eliminate as many as you can. Which frictions are going to trip you up? What time of day best suits your energy levels? Are there things you need — or rather don’t? What’s the ‘sleep in your workout clothes’ trick you can do to make the new habit just falling forward instead of climbing over hurdles?

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Step 3: Track your progress.

I’ve written previously about how I leverage checkboxes to hack my neurochemical processes into a bias toward fitness. While checking each one helps condition us to like fitness more, tracking our progress can help us see the invisible progress we make each day.

The image header of this post is one of Simone Gertz’s Every Day Calendars. I got in on the Kickstarter years ago, seeing the tool as a way to help my family track my last yearlong deployment to Iraq. Now I use the calendar to help motivate me, tapping on a light for each day I work out.

It’s simple, and on some level it’s kind of dumb. But it works. Your invisible progress is made visual. You might find yourself waking up sore, or tired, or just not feeling it, but then you notice, ‘Shit. I’ve haven’t missed a 10th of the month yet. I gotta go today’. And then the opposite pops up, ‘Oh man, I didn’t get a workout in on the 8th the last two months, I gotta go today’. See? Dumb, but effective. And if it’s effective, how stupid is it really?

Old workouts give me drive. While 17 of my 62 PRs in 2025 were from first time workouts — i.e. Fat Thor with Extra Guac — the other 45 were improvements over my previous best. Some were multiple step improvements throughout the year (Tabata Bar Muscle Ups). Others were old dragons I never thought I’d slay, like my 2k Row record set back in 2020. That PR was set after nine solid months of deployment gains. But this spring I sat down on a rower next to my wife and just went full send, shaving nearly 2 seconds to set a new personal best. Not all my PRs this year were endurance / VO2 max. I also set a new high for 8-rep unbroken front squats, my 3-rep Snatch, and my 4-rep Overhead Squat.

Every time you exceed your expectations of a workout, you get an extra burst of dopamine. But to get that hit, your workout must run counter to your expectations. Knowing how well you did last time helps set an expectation that you can exploit for more happy chemicals. Happy chemicals help cement your new habit.

If you aren’t dreading the start of the set just a little bit, then it’s not calibrated right. You should feel some apprehension, just not so much you don’t actually do it.

Beating your PR isn’t even require to get the boost. When the outset of today’s METCON made clear I wasn’t going to finish anywhere near my PR, I had a choice: scale the WoD — lighter weight or fewer rounds — or just let it go. I opted for the later, and even though I finished 7 1/2 minutes slower, I still got to enjoy the dopamine rush, because suddenly ‘Can I even finish this?’ becomes the new expectation to shatter.

Track your progress to reinforce your new habit. This aids to both make the invisible progress visible, and it also helps set the conditions to exploit the same chemical processes typically associated with our worst habits. You don’t need a fancy wall calendar, but if you’re looking for quality tools to help you track your progress, the Kurzgesagt team makes a great Habit Journal that includes even more tips.

Step 4: Enlist Allies.

As I briefly noted above, one of the changes this year was my editor / wife started joining me in work outs. In late January, she asked me to program her a workout once a week. This quickly grew to two, then three workouts, and by the time we moved to Japan we’d settled into five days a week. Because I’m back in regular army land, we only get to work out together Saturdays and Sundays, comparing notes on the other three sessions.

Those weekend WoDS are the easiest for me to get done, and I’ve even taken to saving some of my spicier workouts for them. This is because allies help push you, meaning you don’t need to work as hard to get the energy to do the workout.

The math is pretty simple. If I’m very low motivation, with only a 50% of wanting to work out on any given day, that makes the odds of getting my gains a coin flip. But if I add just one additional person willing to tag along, even if they have the same level of motivation, suddenly the odds of at least one of us being motivated goes up to 75%. It only takes a handful of fellow people committed to always working out if at least one person is up for it to shrink the odds of skipping a workout to less than 1 in a 100. That’s less than four missed workouts a year.

We don’t even have to do the workout together to get the push, though I much prefer those. If my wife is sore from any given day’s deadlifts, woe unto me if I didn’t get my gains.

Taking the time to find other people to join you in making the same lifestyle change is a worthwhile investment. Especially when you all combine the tips leveraged above. Other teammates will suggest additional intermediate steps, they’ll help identify and tear down 3’ walls, and when you can visualize their progress as well, new habits become easier to repeat until they become your muscle memory.

So, before you wake up tomorrow, go round up all those agricultural tools you ‘borrowed’ from your neighbor and give them back. While you’re over there, ask them if they want to join you on your New Year’s Resolution. Sit down and spitball some intermediate steps and ask your LLM of choice for ways to make both of your progress visible.

Good luck in 2026. あけましたおめでとうございます.

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2025 Gains Year in Review

At the end of each year, I go back over my logs and do a quick assessment, looking for what I want to tweak. What movements do I want to improve? Which do I want to stop worrying about? What’s working for me, and what’s not?
What was my #1 takeaway of 2025?

I worked out 296 of the 365 days in 2025 (81%), which is just above five days a week. Of those, I only ran 77 times (26% of workout days) for an average distance of 1,644m. However, only four of those were 5k or longer, and 7 were Red Hill ‘runs’.3

Take out these, and the three 3.2ks I ran for AFTs and my average goes down to just 1010m on the days I ran. For comparison, I swam 58 days, for an average of 1681m each.

Despite not doing the army standard of long slow runs, I aced all three AFTs this year, as well as my own personal litmus bars.4

I see two main things that continue to contribute to my fitness. First, starting my workouts with three hard minutes on either the rower, the assault bike, or the curve treadmill. In each warm-up set I get my heart rate up into a VO2Max range, before recovering during my mobility work and then finishing with my main set. I did this 212 of the 296 days (72% or roughly four days a week — I usually skip this on swim days). I also focus my METCONs on moderate weight, failure-based workouts where again I elevate my heart rate into VO2Max repeatedly. Workouts where I must stop, recover, and then get back at it.

This setup continues to be high payoff for me. I’ve been doing a variation of this for six years now and my two-mile run times have stayed pretty consistent. Even when taking on Fat Thor with Extra Guac, I managed to finish my two-mile in 14:00.

I continue to argue shifting away from slow repetitive (ab)use runs is the best bang for the buck investments in your fitness. I’ve got six years of data and a dozen ACFT/AFTs to back me up. You can improve your cardio capability while building up the bone and muscle density you’ll need to draw from later in life.

The move to Japan this summer brought me back to the regular army, which has a radically different philosophy and culture of fitness than the one I spent the previous 17 years in. It’s been a bit jarring and disappointing to see how little many soldiers know about building fitness. Most of the units here focus on those army approved long slow runs. When they do add weights, it’s typically only to do bench presses — a movement I hardly do twice a year.

With that in mind, my New Year’s Resolution is to share my fitness knowledge and do what I can to shift the culture. I’m setting out this year to share workouts and tips both locally and here on Substack. Subscribers — it’s still free — will get them in a weekly note. Some will be the ones I’ve already shared in my previous Where Data Meets Gains series — they are, after all, workouts I still do each year. But I’ve got 52 weeks to cover I’ll share new ones as well.

These workouts focus on Moneyball gains — workouts that require minimal kit and avoid highly technical lifts, but provide maximal returns on investment, all at minimum injury risk. So, if you haven’t already, subscribe to make sure you don’t miss out on any of the 52.

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3

Footnote: Lest any of you think I gave up on my ‘no running’ ways, calling my trudge of Red Hill ‘running’ was being generous, as you can see in the chart below as speed plumets. I capped off each loop with a Tabata Sprint, which is the spiky bit at the end of the curve.

I’ve always had a weak spot for a good map.

Maps are the original data visualization. They distill data into visuals that reveal as much about their creators as the worlds they depict. They even make better going-away gifts than stiff, boring plaques.On my last combat tour in Iraq, we’d worked with the Intel shop to make a great map which ran almost the entire length of the back wall in the JOC. With just the right amount of terrain detail and key landmarks marked, it wasn’t the cluttered mess too many military made maps devolve into. We translated the map onto almost all our products, and as people began to rotate out, we started printing smaller ones that the team could sign. Half the fun was picking the perfect spot on the map for your John Hancock.

To the USMC Fires Officer: ‘Your fires career culminated here!’

After leaving Iraq, I took the simple style of that map with me to my command in Okinawa. The map at the top of this post is a reproduction of the one I used when in command in Okinawa. I stole the orientation from our Japanese partners, who turned theirs 90⁰ in their 2020 defense white paper. The work version — which still hangs in the 1-1 commander’s office — has all the PRC and US bases marked, as well as every C130 capable airfield. Like I said, maps tell us a lot about who made them too.

The map hung on the wall behind me. About a week after it was printed my operations officer was joining me in my office for a VTC when he abruptly exclaimed, ‘I get it now!’ That map did more to explain the PRC’s strategy in the Western Pacific than any 40 page white paper ever did.

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I’m not the only one with an affinity for maps. Two fellow substacks recently posted their own homages to maps. James Lucas’ Beauty is Truth examines 10 maps that inspire awe not just for their art, but for their history.

Beauty is truth

The Beauty of Old Maps

In the words of Gilbert H. Grosvenor, National Geographic magazine’s founding editor…

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8 months ago · 228 likes · 9 comments · James Lucas

Ancient maps were often born from heroic exploration, yet their true magic extends far beyond the feats themselves. They also carry us back to a time before satellites, before GPS, when the world was vast and mysterious.

In the same vein as the map we made in Okinawa, CDR Salamander beats the drum on the need for our military to understand the sea we need to cross just to reach a fight in Asia.

CDR Salamander

Do we Know We Need to Fight an Offensive War in a Funnel in the Western Pacific?

I first saw this map three years ago, and it recently resurfaced in my thoughts…

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7 months ago · 108 likes · 142 comments · CDR Salamander

For the PRC, the primary military threat to plan for comes across the1 Pacific into a funnel that terminates at its most important SLOC. It’s the United States of America, and the US has a series of islands leading right into the heart of the PRC’s. It starts in Hawaii — Midway, Wake, Guam — and then to U.S. allies: the Philippines, Japan, and Australia.

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I’d been thinking about maps before I read Lucas’ and Sal’s posts. My new job meant new products, and I wasn’t happy with the pixelated maps on the ones we were using. So I went looking to repeat the process I’d run back in Oki.

Except the Army doesn’t have GEOInters up here in Honshu. Not in the garrison, nor in the Intel battalion across the street. Having struck out through the traditional path, I went hunting elsewhere.

Following a Reddit thread led me to this superb tutorial by joewdavis on github. A weekend of learning and tinkering later and I had new background maps:

What was remarkable about this wasn’t that I made a map. Anyone can make one. That is what is remarkable to me.

I put my first toe into 3D modeling as an undergraduate in 2001. Back then, 3DSMax cost over $3,000, and ArcGIS was just as expensive. And most critically, the geographic data I needed for the map was definitely not available at a few key strokes. I don’t even know where to start calculating the cost of acquiring LIDAR maps of an entire archipelago in the early 2000s, but it would likely have been several hundred dollars.

Two decades later the cost of the entire project plummeted from more than $6,000 and weeks of work down to about 5 hours of YouTube and self-study, and barely $1 of electricity. What used to take a team of different Army soldiers is now only a Reddit tutorial away.

The growth of ML data models shows similar trends. While the news continues to chase each new mega-model release of the big AI firms, there are thousands of micro-models freely available on the internet today. I didn’t pay a penny more than the cost of electricity to make ‘Trooper’ with Stable Diffusion. I didn’t need a bleeding edge H200 card; instead using the GTX 1070 I purchased back in 2017.

The plunge in costs of sense and strike are part of this trend, with more and more data becoming opensource. The impacts are huge, but only if we take advantage of them. Where should you be looking for data to inform your operations? What new tools are available which can help you visualize, manipulate, and update that data? What more can your team do when jobs which used to take a dozen soldiers working for hours now take a single person — or agent — minutes?

It’s uncharted territory, and I don’t pretend to know the best way forward. But I do know we won’t get there led by data illiterate leaders who keep writing ‘hic sunt dracones’ on their maps. We need leaders who are driven to explore those unknown blank spots.

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‘If you say “dashboard” one more fucking time, I’m gonna kick you out of the building,’ I threatened.

That finally convinced the sales head of the SOFReady team to shut up. Six months before, I’d written a long and detailed critique of their software and suggested ways to make it useful and viable. My commander mistook this to mean I wanted to volunteer my battalion to host their sales team. I ended up spending most of the first half-an-hour trying to dialogue with the lone coder they brought with them, but the sales guy kept interrupting her every time she tried to answer.

Stunned by my rebuke, the salesman open and closed his mouth a couple times, baffled as a carp. His shock was likely because ‘dashboard’ was the magic sales word that had worked so well on other commanders. Seeing his dejected expression, I tried to mollify him. ‘They’re just fancied up PowerBI charts, calm down.’

Personally, I haven’t found dashboards very useful. This despite having been part of a team which built one ourselves for our commander when I was a major.

Apparently, I’m in good company. Last week Storm King Analytics published a great piece about their shortcomings — the inspiration for this post. When I restacked it, Sean Harper over at War Quants echoed with his sentiment:

100% of the military dashboards I’ve made for decision makers were dropped after a couple of months and they returned to PowerPoint slides made by staff officers.

In response to our posts, fellow NSTR alum and initiator of the Harding Project Zach Griffiths reached out for ideas to bring data literacy to his new command:

‘I’m trying to get my battalion to a live data command and staff. Is that a dashboard or something else?’

Well, to all those out there like Zach, here’s my best offering.

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What Is A Dashboard?

A dashboard can be helpful in specific situations. If done well, they can answer your questions at a glance. But they only help you answer questions already asked. I’ll hit more on this in a bit, but first, what makes for a good dashboard?

Start with the term’s namesake and go sit in your car. Look at two things:

1. How many different indicators are there?

2. How are they different?

Good dashboards only have a handful of indicators, because they’re trying to avoid information overload. On my car, only seven are always on: speed, fuel, RPMs, battery, odometer, temperature, and time. There’s probably at least seven more that come on when they need my attention — seat belt, turn signal, check engine, etc — but are otherwise dark.

Seven things can be a lot to look at — most humans struggle to keep more than four things at a time in their working memory — so the size of the indicators is used to dictate our focus. Speed is given prominence, both in size and location on the left, the position most English speakers read from. Fuel is important enough to get an additional secondary indicator that kicks on when it gets really low. But fuel only gets just 1/6th of the dial that the km/h does. This is because how fast you are going it probably the most important decision you make in a car, and the one you make most often.

Battery and RPMs are only important when something’s wrong, so they are stuck sharing the same dial. Every other indicator is tiny in comparison; there to be available when you want them and ignored the rest of the time.

Unfortunately, most of the dashboards I’ve seen across the military are visual train wrecks. Sven Balnojan hits their primary failing in his own takedown:

‘Your dashboard isn’t a Christmas tree.’

Bad dashboards are weak attempts to pretend a command is data driven. They try to look busy by pulling in every piece of data you can into a single screen so densely packed with colors and text that you can convince yourself you’re seeing anything.1

I can usually tell how analog a command is just by looking at their dashboard. I can also predict with strong confidence the odds their underlying data is shit.

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What Are You Deciding?

When we go back to the example in your car, all the indicators are there to answer a question and drive a decision. There isn’t an indicator that is tracking how many times your turn signal has blinked, nor a light which turns on when your car’s cup holders are 75% filled. Your car’s dashboard has been edited down to just the things that help you make the decisions you need to make while driving.

Meanwhile, military dashboards are too often just littered with pieces of flair. Too many pie charts that don’t drive decisions. We’ve taken stale PowerPoint charts with meaningless percentages and replaced them with a patchwork of colorful charts with equally meaningless slices. You might be saving your command a small bit of time by having the stats update automatically instead of by hand via PowerPoint, but they still don’t drive a decision.

You’d be more effective examining what stats you’re using to make decisions in the first place. As I stated above, a dashboard can only answer a question you’ve already asked. The ironic part is we often call these ‘commander’s dashboards’ when there’s nothing command about them. An indicator can change from amber to red when a stat hits 70%, but what does that mean? What decision does it drive? Red means action must be taken, but what? All those colors and bars and stats and all they are telling you is ‘check engine light’ — something is wrong, but you’re going to need a specialist to tell you what to do about it.

We do this all the time in meetings like command and staff. What does it mean when the box for Alpha company’s Cyber Awareness is only 95%?2 What about when Bravo Company’s NCOER’s box drops to 77%? What specifically should they do?

Contrast that lack of clarity with what a team that works with real data can do. To prepare for our 100% inspection of Army Family Housing, we built a table for here in Zama, and the Department of Public Works (DPW) team quickly input all the information we had on every home, to include the name, rank, units of the residents.

But we didn’t bother making a dashboard out of the data, because that wasn’t going to help me drive action. I didn’t need to tell my fellow commanders what percentage of their formations still needed to sign up. I needed to tell them who. So, we just used the raw data, and with a week left before sign-ups closed, I was able to send each command a list of everyone who still needed to take action.

There is perhaps nothing which brings joy to a command sergeants major’s heart like a by-name-list of soldiers who are out of tolerance. Within days we were down to just a handful of stragglers.

Compounding Returns

But the real advantage to working with data came a couple days later when the senior commander asked me a different question entirely.3 He wanted to know something else about next year, and the years after. We didn’t have a dashboard dial to tell me that, because neither my team nor I had anticipated the question. But with just two minutes of poking at my team’s database, I could give the commander a rough answer. No phone call to the DPW team, not 24 hours later after everyone had checked their emails. Just two minutes with a couple slicers.

And then, later that week, another director came to me and brought up the housing database. Our emergency services team handles guest passes on post. Under the old process, someone requesting a pass would first come to our visitor’s center, but then drive over to housing to confirm their residency, only to drive back to the visitor’s center to turn that in to get their approved pass.

An ICE comment brought the inefficiency to my attention, and I’d tasked my director to see how we could streamline the process. The director noted as long as the housing database stayed accurate, his team could check it right there on the spot in the visitor’s center. One simple database was reaching across directorates to save everyone time. Soon we were musing how to modify the onboard / offboard process to automatically update the database. Making the work do the work, which would both improve our data and save us even more time.

PowerPoint Narcan

Everybody has a dashboard in their car. That doesn’t make them data literate. When I wrote my first article in War on The Rocks, I didn’t propose giving every commander a dashboard. I argued we needed data literate commanders; leaders who can look at data use it to make decisions, who can link up disparate streams of information to generate new insights.

My yearlong sabbatical is over and I’m back at work — hence the sporadic posts. Like all my previous assignments, PowerPoint was the lingua franca when I got here. I’ve been working to kill it wherever I can, and even seen some unexpected early successes.

But weening an organization off PowerPoint takes a lot of work, and I don’t think dashboards are the best means to detox. This is because what we really need is to tell stories with our data. Storm King’s ended his post by calling for us all to reflect:

‘Am I showing data, or telling a story?’

This echoed exactly what I first heard Natalie Stone argue in a brown bag lunch session.

‘Data visualization is first and foremost about the story you want to tell. Is the story you want the audience to take away, the same story you believe you are communicating?’

Last year, we were so floored by her pitch when we first heard it, we had her repeat to for the entire Drink, Think, Write, Fight team. And then I invited her onto Downrange Data for two guest posts. Natalie laid out that data driven decision making is built on the ability to tell truer stories, to ourselves and to others.

Dashboards can be a tool for that, but for me dashboards are giving someone fish, versus teaching them. I want all the members of my team to be able to answer questions and drive decisions. Real data literacy, working with the data itself, is the way to help them do that. It also enables them to tell stories together, like above when two directorates start sharing the same database for different reasons.

Dashboards don’t do that.

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I graduated from the Q-course in the spring of 2008, and after a brief road-trip across America, signed into 1st Special Forces Group at Fort Lewis. Three weeks later I climbed out of the back of a humvee as the executive officer (XO) for AOB 1320 at FOB Warhorse in Diyala, Iraq.1 My experience was far from unique; a lot of us found ourselves in combat zones less than a month after we first donned our green berets.

I’ve heard plenty of operators claim that you need a vetted and experienced captain to be an AOB XO, especially in combat. While I’m certain there’s benefits to it, I’d argue that the XO billet is a great segue to detachment command. Especially when you’re under the tutelage of great mentors like my company commander and sergeant major.2

Everyone has to get experience from somewhere, and my time as the XO gave me plenty. I quickly learned about OPFUNDs and mission essential letters (MELs), and how to coordinate and control surveillance drones.3 I also started to learn the culture of special forces. But the most critical thing I learned as an XO was how wrong I was about which detachment I wanted to go to.

I grew up as a swimmer, then played water polo in college, and proudly told my battalion commander that I wanted to go to a dive team. I had wanted to go to scuba school since first hearing about it as a cadet in ROTC, and now years later a dive team would give me my chance.

Over the course of the deployment’s first month, I slowly got out to each of the team houses, mostly to inventory all the deployed property. Along the way I got to meet each of the detachments and get a sense of each’s unique team culture. Things like what they prioritized and what they didn’t; how they improved their team houses and how they worked with their partners. It didn’t take long out at the dive team’s site to figure out they weren’t the right fit for me.

ODA 1323 (formerly and now again 183), the boat team, was the last team I visited. They were the team I knew the least about before visiting them; they didn’t reach out to the B-team much. When I delivered a shipment of construction supplies, I found out why.

The first thing you saw as you entered their headquarters was a single sheet of paper hanging on the wall with the words above written on it.

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When I got back to FOB Warhorse, I walked into my commander’s office and told him, 'Sir, I want to go to 1323'.

I had thought the detachment I wanted to join was all about their specialty. I wanted to get a badge, to get a marker for being elite. But just that first glimpse of 1323 showed me something else I wanted more. I wanted to be on a team where unconventional warfare (UW) wasn’t a mission, it was a way of life.

1323 didn’t talk a lot about UW in the same way fish don’t talk much about water. UW underpinned everything they did. It didn’t matter if we were on a JCET to Cambodia or executing Village Stability in Afghanistan, doing an mountain training in the Olympic Peninsula or our pre-deployment training at Fort William Henry Harrison, Montana.4 For 1323 everything had a UW angle, one they exercised whenever they could. I knew that a team with this sort of attitude was going to be successful in any mission, and my 27 months commanding 1323 showed me that culture trumps everything. 16 years and multiple commands later, that team, its leadership and its culture, still echoes with me.

I still remember that sign hanging in the TOC, and I think about it often. What's great is how it encapsulates the essence of what it really means to be special forces. It starts with relationships, which are critical to special operations, in particular unconventional and irregular warfare.

Always your first step. ‘Borrow it’ gets you the thing you need at no cost and it helps build relationships with someone else. When you’re a small team on your own, often the most valuable thing you can collect is favors. Favors are more valuable than gold. Favors were what my company sergeant major told us to hoard when we hit the ground there at FOB Warhorse. ‘Go become everyone’s best friend and fixer’.

Not as good as borrowing, because you’re going to have to give something up. But trading still helps build relationships. Barter reduces cost, plus it helps you build the trust a relationship needs get to one where you can borrow. Trade favors first; but be willing to part with your own stuff in the interest of longer-term gains. Team coins and T-shirts can go a very very long way.

This costs you both time and resources. But green berets are at their best when they are self-reliant (trained to live off nature’s land…). If you make it all by yourself, you don’t get new relationships, so don’t overlook the opportunity in having someone show you how or help you make it.

This one is certainly going to be the most controversial. Every general officer from SWC to the Chief of Staff of the Army is going to have a visceral reaction to those two words.5 This is due to a not unearned reputation for illegal behavior across special operations. SOCOM conducted a review in 2021 in an attempt to answer for such failings.

‘Battlefield recovery’ is certainly a more sanitized way to get what you need, but it’s not the only means. In fact, even outside SOF, confiscation and seizure are expressly permitted under the Law of Armed Conflict. The truth is ‘procurement’ has been an art since armies first marched. Peloponnesian soldiers held up the example of the spartan boy with his fox as a virtue to be emulated. The film The Green Berets has SGT Petersen’s character for a reason.

As soldiers we can legally kill. As green berets, we are expected to bend and break governance systems. The critical ingredient is we are entrusted to know when and where we can and cannot take these actions. While ‘We operate in the gray’ is a special forces staple, it can also be the most toxic thing a green beret says if it’s not underpinned by a clear understanding of the authorities, the risks, and the potential second and third order consequences of our actions.

‘Steal it’ represents a step change in flow chart. This is because stealing comes with a lot of risks. Not just physical ones, but operational ones. Stealing can irrevocably sour relationships. It can hurt the local populace in unplanned ways, both in the loss of a key piece of equipment, and in the retributive response of an oppressive government. This is why even more important than not getting caught, know who you are stealing from. Take from your enemy, never from a friend. Take for the mission, never for yourself.

No, those steps aren’t out of order. 1323 knew buying things comes with the biggest costs to resources, and not just in money. It can also come with a lot of paperwork to justify why you need to pay for it. MELs take time to get signatures and legal reviews. Time is always running against you in UW. Also, OPFUND is not unlimited. In Afghanistan and Iraq we got used to being able to get more money, but in UW you don’t know when you’re getting another resupply.

However, the relationship costs are lower than getting caught stealing. So, when you must buy something, your goal should be to move whomever you’re purchasing from up the partnership ladder. You want them to become people with whom you can trade or borrow from in the future.

Do you really, really need it? Or do you just want it? By the end of the Global War on Terror, a lot of teams thought they couldn’t do an operation without two orbits of close air support on station, seven days of drone stare, and a flight of helicopters packed with a company of commandos — all to catch three guys in flip flops.

You won’t have any of that in the First Island Chain. Welcome to the Land of Mission Command, where there’s no Golden Hour but no 40 slide CONOPS either.

For 1323, RFSing the b-team was almost like admitting we failed. Which is ok. We all fail sometimes. Hell, the whole Q-Course was ‘failure-based learning’. And the B-team is staffed with soldiers whose whole job is to help the teams. But it shouldn’t be a detachments principal means of solving problems.

During that Iraq deployment, ODA 1323 went a week without reliable water before finally RFSing support from the commander. They made absolutely sure they couldn’t solve their problem themselves first. In today’s world of cheap sensors and cheap strike, every time you key the mike you risk calling in fire on your own position. That risk better be worth whatever it is you’re asking for.

We hold the SOF truths to be timeless. They transcend the changes in tools and different conflicts, serving as a touchstone for our community that defines how we operate. 1323’s TOC memo is another SOF Truth for me. Something I encountered at the start of my special forces career that I still hearken back to here at the end of it.

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‘Steal it’ is certainly controversial. If you found it, or any of the other lines sparking ideas, please share them below.

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It’s not hard to find articles decrying Social Media (SM) algorithms for controlling our world these days. But the algorithms aren’t (yet) general AI agents with the ability to make decisions. Today they’re just fancy math problems.

Blaming the algos is excusing our own role in the process.

Now before you think I’m punching down, I say this as someone whose media diet is easily 95% curated by social networks. I only go direct to a single ‘traditional news outlet’, The Economist.1 It’s not that I never read stories by CNN, FoxNews or The New York Times; it's just those stories have to make it through SM algos to reach me.2

I’m not going to get on my high horse and tell everyone their own SM use is wrong per se. I’m just going to describe mine. My critique is with those who don’t own their own personal agency in the process. You don’t have to make a choice about what and how you consume. But not making a choice is, in my opinion, a dumb one.

Read, But Verify

Even if a story navigates the wickets of my SM algo filters, I usually still bounce it against two additional gate keepers. For contentious issues or ones where I don’t know enough about the counterpoint, I check with Ground News, which I’ve found is the fastest way to get an outline of an issue. It gives you a quick sentiment analysis and puts the counter-argument one click away.

For several years I’ve been using Ad Fontes Media to evaluate the overall reliability of sources. To be clear, both of these tools are also algo-filters, and they are subject to their own biases. I’ve just found them to be better arbiters of information than other tools out there. Again, use the algos, just with intention.

There are also sources I will almost never read. I’ve found Huffpost to be equal parts sloppy and clickbaity, and so it takes a lot for me to even open one of their hyperlinks. I generally discount Fox News stories, but I do read Fox Business when they pop up. I’m not wedded to just ‘news’ sources, in particular when it comes to technical subjects; but that broadly outlines the left and right limits of my ‘mainsteam’ media diet.

Now this only applies to the articles that get through the SM filters in the first place. Plenty of people complain about ‘mainstream media’ not covering or reporting issues and viewpoints and my SM gate keepers are no different.

You’re The Product

Almost every SM platform has the same goal: monetize our eyeballs. ‘Maximize engagement’ is generally how they describe it. Twitter/X, Facebook/Instagram, LinkedIn, or any of the myriad of other apps out there are each private companies pursuing profit by trying to sell our attention to advertisers one microsecond at a time.

While pretty uniform in goal across apps, each has come up with different ways to answer that same fancy math problem. I don’t have any direct access to any of the code, but by observing what does and doesn’t get into my infinite scroll, I’ve been able to tease out some broad strategies they appear to be using.

The SM tools we use have outsized impact on what we hear about, in particular since most of us aren’t going to the news sources directly. We’re not collectively sitting down each night with Walter Cronkite anymore. SM algos are gate keepers, and which apps you use will impact what you see. But which apps you don’t use will also shape your diet. In my case I don’t use a lot of them. I’m going to do this reverse Clint Eastwood-style, from the worst to the best. First up the apps I don’t use.

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The Ugly

Perhaps most impactfully, I’m not on TikTok. This isn’t really an ideological stance. Aside from the constitutional question of a president just refusing to follow a law passed by Congress, I don’t really care about TikTok. But TikTok is banned on government devices. Since I’ve spent most of my career working in buildings I can’t bring my phone into, my app selection is heavily impacted by which websites I can access via browser on my government computer. At the end of a long day, when I finally get outside and can access my phone, I typically have more than enough alerts to catch up on, so I never bothered joining TikTok.

I don’t use Bluesky or Truth Social either, because I’m not interested in nakedly partisan filter bubbles regardless of party. I never joined Threads since I haven’t seen what it’d get me that Instagram doesn’t already. I have a Facebook account but I pretty much only get on there to a) talk with a boomer or b) buy or sell gently used furniture.3 I’ve never bothered to checkout Mastodon, and Medium’s spam annoyed me enough to block them.

Twitter / X

I didn’t start using Twitter until I was a graduate student in 2012. My fellow students gave me a hefty list of terrorism and national security accounts to follow, so I signed up. After just one weekend, I’d discovered Twitter was the fastest way to get wrong news in the world. My opinion hasn’t improved.

Credit where credit is due, Twitter did change the way news was reported. I was studying terrorism back at Kings and it provided a prefect frame to understand the change in media. Black September didn’t attack on the 1972 Munich Olympic Games because they hated sports, it was because that’s where the cameras were. Terrorism before SM was heavily biased towards attacking sites where the media was already present. But in 2012, when I was studying at King’s in London, terrorism could be live tweeted. The media channels have been chasing SM ever since.

Twitter’s algo never was a very good source for me, but since it’s switched to X, I’ve all but stopped logging on to the app. I share my latest Substack post and then promptly log back off. This is because X’s approach to maximizing engagement appears to mimic ‘grisly car crash porn’. Their algo heavily weights how long we watch or listen to things, down to those microseconds. As a result, X floods our feeds with the intellectual equivalent of car crashes. We find ourselves almost involuntarily rubber-necking.

X has discovered that we’ll stop and ‘engage’ with things that make us angry even more than things we like. So the app pushes controversial and anger-inducing content to keep your eyeballs, so much so it can feel like an infinite scroll of head-on collisions between a train and a school bus. This has most recently been encapsulated by the proliferation of ‘point counter-point’ style uploads where the video starts with a short clip of one political side of an issue followed by a take down. Which side you’re on doesn’t really matter, the video captures and antagonizes both sides, which drives ‘engagement’.

The Bad

Instagram

I don’t find Instagram vastly superior to X these days. Which is a shame, because it actually used to be.

Before Zuckerberg decided to stop deemphasizing political content, Instagram was actually a fun place for me to get my daily moment of Zen. When the political suppression filters were on, Instagram didn’t show me partisan car-crash porn. The app has the same bias toward watch time that X does, but it was at least smart enough to know that while rubber necking is a human instinct, it’s not necessarily the thing we actually want. When you’re trying to use my attention to leverage me into actually buying things, this seems like a winning strategy — one Instagram has sadly abandoned.

Before the change, Japanese woodworking videos were my Instagram kryptonite. I’d be quietly swiping past a few friends' posts and milmeme accounts and then suddenly there was a quiet video of just hands slowly crafting simple joinery. I was stopped like a deer in headlights. I have a similar weakness for good cooking videos, which is why — coupled with a wicked sweet tooth — Amaury Guichon always found his way into my feed. What can I say, I respect craft.

And then one day, for no clear reason I can discern, Instagram fed me my favorite account, one I instantly subscribed to: Streetcraft. I can’t help it. Somehow urban planning just fascinates me. I’m also very pro-roundabout, even more so after a year living in Australia. I simply can’t swipe past the videos as they explain how to fix a simple traffic intersection, or the potential of our neighborhoods if we’d just ditch crappy self-imposed zoning rules.

Before the recent change, Instagram didn’t feed me a lot of news. But it did give me educational content, which I enjoy. And it also lead me to more than one Kickstarter page, which in theory is the conversion the app was going for. Get me scrolling and find an advertisement that catches my interest enough to click and then potentially buy.

But lately Instagram has descended into a lot of those political point counter-point videos I mentioned above. Admittedly, I was already trending away from Instagram when most of the milmeme accounts started sharing heavily partisan content. I’ve been disengaging more and more from the app as a result. I now mostly only go on to share my Downrange Data posts.

Reddit

I do like reddit, though only in certain places. I’ve found r/worldnews will occasionally find international stories I didn’t hear about. But r/politics generally serves up too many biased sources for my tastes, and r/conservative is even worse. Instead, reddit is mostly for my niche nerdy guilty pleasures, like r/dataisbeautiful which serves up innovative and clever ways to display data, and r/theocho which is everything you ever wanted in an obscure sports channel. Whenever you need a troubleshooting guide, be it for a video game or a car, redditors have your back.

LinkedIn

I was a bit of a latecomer to LinkedIn as a SM platform. I didn’t even think of LinkedIn as SM after catching a 2023 episode of Slate’s ‘What Next:TBD’ which reported more influencer and SM users were publishing on the site. The draw appeared to be that, since accounts were ostensibly true name, there was less bot spam and people weren’t as likely to spew hate-inspiring posts.

LinkedIn’s algo hasn’t been as easy to reverse engineer for me as the other apps, in part because aside from some ads, you basically don’t see content from outside your contact list unless someone inside it comments or amplifies it for you. It’s not a bad app, and I do find the occasional interesting story on LinkedIn, though you do have to wade through a lot of low effort and LLM generated content. Over the last year I have also seen a spike in the amount of nakedly partisan content on the app. Whether this is the algo trying to get the same engagement stats, or just a result of the Xodus isn’t clear. Regardless, it’s not the content I’m looking for, which is why LinkedIn lands in the ‘bad’ column. Better than the ‘ugly’ of twitter, but not good enough for ‘good’.

The Good

Substack

I’ve been using Substack for a year now. It’s an interesting SM platform, in part because it’s monetization strategy is different. Other apps monetize eyeballs and screen time on the infinite scroll. Substack actually encourages slow, uninterrupted reading. Substack isn’t selling ads directly.

To me, Substack is an evolution on the disruption of Twitter. It gives creators their own platform. You don’t have to read The New York Times to get a Nobel Prize-winning economist’s writing anymore, you can get it directly from Paul Krugman’s Substack. Nate Silver left FiveThirtyEight years ago, but he was an early adopter of Substack.

Substack makes its money when people who write on Substack make money. It’s not as focused on the ‘engagement time’ or flash in the pan virality; it even gives you convenient heads up on how long a post will will take to read. Substack’s algo understands that it’s not necessarily how long you look at something that determines how much it moves you. Substack understands fans.

While I listen to Taylor Swift on Spotify, I’m not going to buy her albums. But Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly? I’ll buy ever single album, even the mediocre ones. The difference is TSwift is music I listen to, and the others are bands I’m a fan of. I’m not judging Swifites. I enjoy her music. It’s just I’m never going to personally fork out the money for a Taylor Swift concert. But I will drive seven hours to catch a live show of Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats.

Substack uses this alternative means to metric their engagement. I think Taylor Swift has individual songs with more plays than the combined discographies of all three of those other bands I mentioned. But there’s a difference between what you’ll consume and what you’ll pay for. Substack seems to understands this, so its algo is a little different than the previous SM apps I’ve covered.

YouTube

YouTube’s algorithm isn’t perfect, and has drawn a lot of flack for ‘funneling’ people into conspiracy theories and the ‘manosphere’. This hasn’t been my experience though, likely due to how I interact with the algo.

Until grad school, I thought YouTube was just for cat videos. Then YouTube randomly threw Crash Course’s ‘2,000 years of Chinese History’ onto my feed.4 Unlike the above apps, YouTube throws ads at you in the middle of content you are watching, which means it get’s a different pulse on your engagement. It’s not as much about what you start watching as it is about what you keep watching. In the case of my family, Crash Course naturally led us to Vlogbrothers, Hank and John Green’s still running experiment with YouTube from 2007. Which next led to SciShow. Having firmly established an interest in science, the algo promptly followed up with Minutephysics, SmarterEveryDay, Veritasium, and a slew of others.5

At this point the YouTube algo had us pegged for people who like educational media that cites its sources, so it dog piled on. We got art (LindsayEllis & Nerdwriter) and artists (ThalassoHobbyer & StudsonStudio), makers and engineers (SimoneGiertz, MarkRober, & XylaFoxlin), history (ExtraHistory) and even the law (LeagleEagle). We’ve subscribed to over a hundred different channels now, many from crossover videos, but most from algo curated thumbnails.

NSTR

Hands down, my #1 algo is NSTR. For those who haven’t read Nick Frazier’s and my article, NSTR is a private user-run mil-sec chat group on Discord. It is also my primary source of news and information every day, and has been since soon after we founded it back in 2018.

Despite all I’ve written above about SM apps, when it comes to news, my diet is overwhelmingly from podcasts. I may be on the higher end of podcasts consumers.6

I can’t think of a podcast recommendation that came from a computer algo. Almost every episode of every show I’ve ever listened to started with a recommendation from a member on NSTR. All of the podcasts I subscribed to originated there. And because I use the app Podcast Addict for almost all my listening, Spotify and other algos like it don’t get to suggest new podcasts to me.

NSTR is an algorithm, just a human one. It’s also a very very good one. News articles shared overnight are the first ones I read each morning. I have the app running on my desktop and my phone at all times, and it’s typically open in the browser at work.

What’s kind of fascinating is we don’t monetize NSTR in any way. Any member can share whatever they want, or share nothing at all. There’s no membership fee, and the only currency you’ll get from a post that gets attention is some emoji reactions.

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We Are All Algos

It’s a misconception that SM is all filter bubbles which will only tell you what you want to hear. Ironically, you are more likely to live in a real world filter bubble than an online one. Intelligence Squared first introduced me to this in a debate on online dating, a subject I had zero interest in.7 When the side arguing against online dating apps decried the racial bias present in dating apps, the other quickly countered the underlying racial sorting was already present in every bar in America. The difference was the apps could at least measure it, and maybe even do something about it.

Who we spend our time with is an algo. We sort ourselves into living-algos when we choose where we live and go to school, where we work and the sports we play. Hundreds of years ago, the feudal algo meant if you weren’t in the top 1%, your whole world was often restricted to a couple dozen kilometers. Today we have a lot more choice in the ideas and people we bring into our algo. Our states, our communities, our clubs, our family; its algos all the way down.

Why does this matter? Why am I taking time to write a whole post about how to hack SM algos? Because I genuinely think we as a nation need to reflect on how we consume information. America is based on the possibly naïve conceit that the public is smart enough to make decisions. To be the government. We reject the idea of a king, an autocrat, or — in my opinion — a unitary executive who is right about everything. Two hundred and fifty years ago, our founding fathers knew the world is too complicated for a single person to know everything. The world certainly hasn’t gotten less complicated since then.

Americans believe in a ‘free market of ideas’, where, if we poll enough people, we can find the best answer for a way forward. But that means Americans have to put in the work.

In a likely apocryphal story, as he exited the conventional hall after signing the US Constitution on 17 September, 1787, the aged Benjamin Franklin was stopped by one Elizabeth Willing Powel. The prominent Philadelphia socialite asked him which system of government had been decided on. He replied:

‘A republic, if you can keep it.’

Keeping it is work. Not the government’s work. It’s our work. We decide if the sun is rising or setting on America.

I’m not saying everyone needs to become super nerds who exclusively consume top-tier educational content. I don’t. I read a lot of non-fiction, but I also enjoy graphic novels. I play a lot of video games, and my wife and I like to watch sci-fi television and light hearted comedies.

What I am arguing is you can’t just be a passenger. You need to take the wheel when it comes to SM. This is in part because we have no evolved sense of ‘full’ when it comes to information. If you eat too much, eventually your body starts to send you signals to stop. But the infinite scroll has no counterpart in our badly-wired-up-primate-brains. Hank Green had a recent video where he outlined our SM challenge, one where we’re swimming in content but ‘starving for information’.

The algos can be just like LLMs — which are yet another algo — synchofanatic people pleasers. They give you what you want. If you want meaty content that cites its sources, it will find them. Got a hankering for long form deep dives on how geography drives global conflict? YouTube algo is there for you with RealLifeLore.

But if you feed your brain vapid conspiracy potato chips, the algos going to find you all the AI slop you can infinite scroll. In addition to never feeling ‘full’ on content, we also don’t get as clear feedback when the content isn’t good for us. If you drink too much alcohol, you get a hangover. But an hour spent doom-scrolling doesn’t have the same effect, other than a general ennui sensation of pessimism about the universe.

You choose how you interact with the algo. You choose to to be a passive passenger or to take ownership of what it gives you. Think back to your most recent infinite scroll. What app did you use? How long were you on it? What is the most memorable thing you saw? What did the algo feed you? Was it something which ‘…cites zero papers and names zero researchers’?

Does the app guess what you really want? When’s the last time it fed you something that surprised and intrigued you? Is your app making you more or less curious?

If it’s not, how can you use the app differently? How can you leverage the app's biases in your favor? Is there a different app you should be trying instead?

John Green’s opening monologue of the first episode of the first Crash Course series, World History, is still one of the best things I’ve ever seen on YouTube. He frames the challenge of SM, and reminds us that the test is always and everywhere.

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6

I may also have a problem.

I like the insurance industry. That’s probably not a popular opinion. Most people seem to have a very negative view of insurance firms. This mostly stems from health insurance which in the US is a train wreck for a myriad of interconnected reasons beyond this post. When I discuss insurance below, I’m referring to much more clean cut varieties like car and home where you opt into clear plans that detail what is and is not covered.

I like insurance partly because it is a very data driven industry, and also because it’s an industry which calculates, talks, recalculates, and decides — indeed it lives — in terms of risk.1

The underlying irony about insurance is that it's a bad purchase right up until the day before a crisis happens. Then it instantly becomes moronic not to have it. Sticking the landing on that wager is beyond most of us. Perhaps the best story of a group of people doing this is captured in the exceptional book and movie ‘The Big Short’. The engine of the 2008 crash — credit default swaps — are insurance.

That tension — between the logical decision not to buy and rational understanding it’s stupid not to buy — is at the heart of insurance. Most people who pay for insurance will never use it. The entire industry depends on this. The market can’t survive if everyone is cashing in their policies — which is part of why health insurance is tricky.

Home insurance can be pretty expensive. The higher cost is because even ‘cheap’ houses are incredibly expensive purchases and the chances that they will be damaged, while not high, are for the industry a somewhat moderate risk.

Cars are even riskier. Driving is probably the most dangerous thing you do every day. Cars are so risky that in almost every US state it’s illegal to drive a car without insurance. As a fraction of your loan payment, car insurance is a much higher percentage than homeowner’s insurance.2

Conversely, renter’s insurance is incredibly cheap, often less than $10 a month. And yet, young First Lieutenant Davis didn’t think it was worth the trouble to pay for. By dumb luck, the landlord for my first apartment wouldn’t approve my lease unless I got some. This was lucky because years later, in the middle of a PCS, my car was broken into and my belongings stolen. Car insurance only covers the car, but that renter’s policy reimbursed me for everything from the new laptop down to the Michigan State t-shirts I’d lost. In truth, I’d actually forgotten I was still paying for renters insurance until the car insurance company reminded me.

The main reason renter’s insurance is cheap is because the risks aren’t very high, and even if you do submit a claim, they aren’t often terribly expensive. Your renter’s might cover up to $400,000 worth of your stuff, but you don’t typically lose all of your stuff at once.

So why am I taking time to write about all this?

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How Defense Is Similar To Insurance

Defense shares a lot in common with insurance. I first encountered this idea while listening to the New York Stock Exchange’s head of security about a decade ago. He was explaining how his job was really about providing predictability. From the bollards on the streets outside to the cyber defenders behind desks in the basement, the purpose of all that security was to provide firms and traders the calm certainty that regardless of what horrible thing might happen at any moment, the next day would be another normal trading day.

Now states, like those traders on the floor at the NYSE, invest in a lot of things. Most investments are done with the goal of making more money later: stocks and bonds, but also roads and bridges, education and healthcare. Governments put money into these projects with the belief they will garner a greater return on that investment. For the US our investments in programs like Medicaid and Science R&D have seen returns between $1.78 and $2 for every dollar invested.

Defense isn’t like that. Defense is not a revenue generator. Even if you add in the jobs in the military industrial complex and the value of foreign military equipment sales, the costs of defense don’t come close to breaking even. Defense, like insurance, sits over in the expense column. We don’t buy insurance to make a profit.3

The military’s primary role is not actually to win wars. That is certainly in the statement of work, but principally, the military is an insurance program. States invest in their military to hedge against risk — some of them existential — for the same reason the NYSE has a head of security. It is to convince the public that they live in a predictable world where they can make long term bets.

Defense encourages citizens to make long term bets like where to build a factory or where they want to go to school and where they want to raise their families. If you live in a war zone, people tend to make only short term bets. I saw this back in late 2008 when the local Iraqis finally started repairing the flagstones outside the Baqubah City Center. It only came on the heels of three months of quiet after almost a year of monthly suicide bombings at the site. This was one of the first signs of improving security in the province.

War is what Nasim Taleb calls a fat tail risk. This is because wars don’t happen along a normal distribution, but instead happen at ‘beyond three standard deviations of the norm’. That’s stats speak for very unlikely but with huge impact. If you look at a chart of human history, you’ll find very few years — often barely a couple months — where there wasn’t some war going on somewhere. But for any given country’s military, the overwhelming majority of those years were ones of peace.

There’s only a few blotches on the chart above where even half the world’s armies were invited. For most of the world, investing in the military was buying an insurance policy you never cashed in.

Over the last 80 years, since the end of the second world war, a lot of our allies spent a pittance on their defense. They did so for a variety of reasons, which included the US at times discouraging them from spending more. We did this at times overtly, like when we extended our nuclear deterrent; but also more and subtly, through selling US developed arms. When you buy US weapons, you aren’t developing your own domestic capabilities and industries.

These allied states also made the economic decision that 'defense homeowners insurance' was a unnecessary investment. Instead, many countries opted to invest their money in those other profitable endeavors. In the case of Europe, they instead funded a much more generous state, investing in healthcare and education and infrastructure — all things with an anticipated RoI. And they’ve done it for roughly four generations.

Between 1945 to 2022, those bets have turned out to be a correct one. In all that time, the NATO 'catastrophic war insurance' only got cashed in once: when the US invaded Afghanistan.

In Australia, where I just left, they bet that the economy and natural disasters were more likely to topple their government than any foreign power. So the Aussies opted to only invest marginally in 'catastrophic war insurance'. Like Europe, for the last 80 years, this was the right bet. New Zealand bet even harder, in no small part because they knew Australia would absorb any adventurous foreign power before it got to their shores.4

But there’s risk cost in four consecutive generations making the same blind bets. The biggest risk is that you can forget you’re even making a risk decision — the ‘It’s always been this way’ fallacy. A second is it’s harder to take things away once given. Kahneman and Tversky coined it ‘loss aversion’ when they found we really don’t like to give up anything we have, even if we’ve only had it less than an hour. This makes reallocating money out of investments and back into the expenses column harder.

A third risk which compounds these two is so primordial it’s evolutionary. Richard Dawkins details the ‘Dove versus hawk’ dilemma in his book Selfish Gene. The theory examines the ratio of aggression versus peace seeking behavior in a population, noting that the ratio is always in flux. If the number of aggressive individuals — ‘hawks' — in a population gets too high, they can risk species collapse. This drives selective pressure for less aggression. But if the number of peace seeking behavior — ‘doves’ — gets too high, then the payoffs for hawks grows. The distribution is always moving, as populations seek out an evolutionary stable strategy.

States can follow a similar rise and fall. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and then again in 2022, is just one example. The principle commentary from many in the west was ‘State’s don’t do this anymore’, failing to realize their pacificism actually made Russian aggression more likely. They’d forgotten for most of European history Russia’s behavior was very much the norm.

Ukraine’s decision to surrender their nuclear weapons in 1992, in many ways the ultimate insurance policy, looks like a very poor bet in retrospect. Indeed, it seems like we are headed to a world where getting your own nuclear insurance policy is a wise investment. Far better to be North Korea than Libya, Syria, Iraq, and potentially Iran.5

The challenge for most US allies is to overcome those four generations of habit and to shift their domestic investments into insurance expenses. In Europe, perhaps unsurprisingly, the pace of change maps fairly well with ‘proximity to Russia’. But despite the scorn heaped on our allies for spending less all these years, for the last eighty they made the right bet.

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How Defense Is Different From Insurance

Defense, however, is not exactly like insurance. Most people don’t look at their insurance policy as an excuse to set their house on fire.6 But in the 1990s, US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright asked in frustration, ‘What’s the point of of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?’

While investing in the defense can lead to military adventurism, perhaps the biggest difference between normal insurance and defense insurance is you only have to pay normal insurance their premium once. When your house gets burned down, the insurance company doesn’t immediately demand you pay them more money to reimburse you. But in the advent of conflict, the first thing defense does is ask for more money.

Insurance also doesn’t need to buy platforms. State Farm doesn’t need submarines, bombers, tanks, or satellites. Those platforms take time to develop both from a manufacturing standpoint and from a doctrinal one. Tactics need to be developed, taught, and trained. Upgrades need to be tested and implemented.

80 years of investing in war platforms is its own kind of habit. Just about every major war starts off poorly. Often states must scrap old tactics and weapons for new ones. Militaries, conservative organizations almost by their nature, are slow to accept change with a well documented habit of refusing to see the next war out of nostalgia for the last one.

‘The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind, is getting the old one out.’ - B H Liddell Hart

Across history militaries have an almost perfect track record of getting the next war wrong. We almost inevitably have to to go back and relearn how to fight with new tools. France’s Maginot insurance policy was completely circumvented by new tactics after all.

So, while we may decry our NATO allies for their 80 years of not investing enough in their own defense, they did not waste those 80 years investing in the wrong platform either.

Breaking Down Defense

Ukraine, caught in an existential struggle the US has not known in two hundred years, is showing itself much more capable of adapting than we are. Programs like their Brave1 have unrecognizably different acquisition process, one that incentivizes and incorporates local suppliers into a market with local units. It is probably not something we can currently replicate in the US, since that existential risk helps hold Ukranian defense suppliers accountable. In the US, where we struggle to compel a defense contractor to even deliver a system on time, it is unlikely we can adapt and innovate at the pace Ukraine is.

That pace of technological change has been accelerating over the last decades. It shows no sign of slowing down. Death is getting cheaper every day. While large military platforms still have their role, and can do things cheap drones couldn’t dream of, cheap and innovative platforms are having their own strategic impact on the world.

NATO, after underspending for decades, is now heralding ‘5% of GDP’ as a new target.7 But what does ‘5% of GDP’ mean when it’s not clear what you’re buying? Estonia could buy a lone B2 bomber and meet their spending target, while not having any pilots, or any of the requisite ground forces they would need to defend against a Russian invasion.

Ukraine, meanwhile, just inflicted billions of dollars of damage on Russian strategic bombers with drones that barely cost $2k a piece. Those same drones could do similar damage to our own Air Force and Navy in a similar style attack. As the Economist put it, how do you ensure 5% of your GDP isn’t ‘just building up yesterday’s army’?

In insurance, when risks increase so do prices. Air defense is expensive but Ukraine has shown us all it is critical. So is EW. Those risks aren’t just overseas in foreign wars. They are at home, in the ‘deep area’ where many countries used to assume they were safe. It is going to be hard to convince a public accustomed to not buying defense insurance that it’s worth the cost. What happens when people no longer trust that regardless of what horrible thing might happen at any moment, tomorrow will be ‘just another normal trading day’?

The future looks gloomy. And expensive.

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One significant reason why the military has such an unwavering reputation for ‘fighting the last war’ is because we are often buying equipment years behind the need.

Our military acquisition process is slow, typically painfully so. Spread across five deliberate steps, we have to first establish an Initial Capabilities Document (ICD) and explore the current Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction. If we can buy down the tech risks, we can move forward with a Capability Development Document (CDD) which allows us to give clear requirements for industry to bid on. If industries do bid, then we officially have ‘a program’; but, that still has to go through a Critical Design Review (CDR) and then a Low-Rate Initial Production, then a Full-Rate Production Decision Review (FRPDR). All of that with an eye toward the long-term Life-Cycle Sustainment and Disposal of the program.

While everyone understands the reasons for this program’s deliberate pace, it is killing us. Special Operations are supposed to be more agile than our parent services. We have a reputation for moving faster in acquisitions. And yet, despite having plenty of direct contact with our Ukrainian partners fighting right now against the Russian invasion, SOCOM’s acquisition process shows the same stodgy commitment to ‘last war’ platforms. The OA-1K ‘Skyraider 2’ perfectly illustrates this disfunction.

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‘Armed Overwatch’

The OA-1K is a response to the 2017 Tongo Tongo ambush of an SFODA in Niger. I’m not going to go into detail on the attack, because after all the briefs I’ve gotten, I’m not certain what was and wasn’t classified anymore. The pertinent take away for the OA-1K is that in Tongo Tongo the detachment lacked ‘armed overwatch’ which could have both identified the forces maneuvering on the team and responded with fires to aid them.

Reacting to that attack, in early 2018 SOCOM set out to run the five-phase acquisition slog and just this month — seven years later — they released an episode of their SOFCAST podcast providing an update of the OA-1K. I was listening to it while doing snatches last week and quickly found myself shaking my head in frustration. SOCOM is shooting behind the duck with the ‘Skyraider 2’.

SOCOM has a $3 billion dollar contract with L3Harris to produce 75 of the OA-1Ks, which puts their price point at about $40 million dollars per plane. This of course excludes the additional costs to train, feed, and TDY two pilots, whom you also have to track dwell, SGLI, and a dozen other details for. We’re spending in excess of $40 million dollars each for a platform that works only in the competition space. It's dead in the crisis phase and high-end conflict.

In the podcast you’ll hear the airmen talk up the advantages the tiny plane offers over other airframes. It has a rear wheel so it can land on austere airfields and even has an ‘empty pod where the pilots can put their clothes and toothbrush’.1 AFSOC has plans to cross-train the pilots to do the ‘regular needed engine maintenance’, but for now the plane needs its own organic maintenance team. This team is smaller than the one for most AFSOC platforms, but it still needs airmen with dwell, SGLI, and training requirements.2 The guest also touted the additional armor on the plane, though they did not go into detail into the exact level of protection. Given the Houthi rebels managed to shoot down at least six MQ-9 Reaper drones in just the first half of this year, this is probably a very pertinent question.

The platform’s still not ready to roll-out just yet, though SOCOM was excited to share they are on the way as they reclass pilots. The guests on SOCOM’s podcast said they expect to see OA-K1’s '...fielded within two to three years.'

Meanwhile…

Two to three years ago this kid was in high school.

Today he has more Russian tank kills than everyone in the US Army. Combined. Across our entire national history.

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Two weeks ago, Ukraine sent 117 small drones to simultaneously attack four Russian air bases. Those attacks damaged and destroyed over 40 Russian strategic air platforms, which some estimate could cost well over $1 billion to replace. The drones Ukraine employed run about $2,000 each.

‘Even including the operation’s other expenses, Kyiv still probably spent well under $1 million… Ukraine’s Drone Attack Exposes Achilles’ Heel of Military Superpowers - WSJ

At $2,000 dollars apiece, SOCOM could buy 20,000 of them per OA-K1. For the total $3 billion contract with L3Harris, SOCOM could equip all of its roughly 450 different detachments, platoons, and teams more with than 3,000 cheap drones each.

These cheap drones could easily be configured in a variety of options. They could be eyes in the sky ISR versions with longer loiter time. They could be remote controlled ones capable of carrying their own strike payload. Aware of the threat of GPS jamming, they could swap some of their explosive payload for 20 kilometers of cheap expendable fiber optic wire. In reality, it’d best be a mix of all three as well as three other versions: ones that intercept signals or spoof cell towers, ones with their own terminal guidance systems that can conduct their own strikes once armed, and ones that intercept other drones. They could also quickly and easily be updated to new versions no one’s bothered to dream up and build yet.

For $2,000 a pop, every team in SOCOM could have thousands of these. They’d be at a size and weight to enable teams to carry dozens at their fingertips, no ‘austere airfield’ necessary. The limit wouldn’t be cost, but cargo space. No long flight school, no engine maintenance. No additional TDY cost, no new SGLI. No crew rest. They wouldn’t be armored like the OA-K1, but when they’re disposably cheap — when you can afford for every team to have 3,000 of them — who cares? Every team would be in possession of their own ISR and strike platforms. Ones they own, they control. Ones they can launch from their own trucks. Their own ‘armed overwatch’.

Undermining the Monopoly of Force

Plenty of ink has been spilled about the end of the ‘Global War on Terrorism’, and the shift to ‘Great Power Competition’. SOCOM, like the rest of the joint force, needs to be paying attention to the lessons they could learn from Ukraine’s daily innovation. The Ukrainian battle lab has churned out more innovative platforms in three years than SOFWERX has in a decade of existence.

However there’s another reason SOCOM needs to be paying close attention to cheap drones: the Army and other services may be all too happy to spike the football on terrorism, claim victory and move on, but terrorism is a tactic, not an entity you can beat.

States are built on Weber’s ‘monopoly of violence’. Terrorism often seeks to undermine that monopoly, as do other guerilla, insurgent, and criminal groups. As the recent strikes across Russia show, the cost of violence and destruction is going down. Cheap drones aren’t just a tool for states and high-end conflict.3 Aum Shinrikyo operated on a budget of about $30 million dollars (almost $50 million today). It’s hard to keep a monoploy when the barriers to entry are so low.

Cheap drones dramatically reduce the cost of violence. Clever states are already showing they can adapt their operations to exploit opportunities. This month alone Ukraine demonstrated the potential for these strikes in their Operation Spiderweb. Israel did the same in their Operation Rising Lion, where SOF teams inside Iran used cheap strike drones to suppress the Iranian air defenses and soften up other targets. SOCOM needs to be on the bleeding edge of understanding how to fight both with and against these threats. Buying crop dusters isn’t getting us there.

We need to figure out what we can salvage from the current acquisition process, but we need to fundamentally reform the way we’re making our kit. We need to adopt a software approach that can move at the speed of cheap tech for all but the most high end and unreplaceable platforms. And we need to do it now, not in two to three years. No one is waiting for us to catch up.

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I first heard about ‘Operator Syndrome’ when it was included in the House version of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

‘Section 732—Study on Testosterone Levels of Members of Army Special Operations Forces: This section would direct the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness to conduct a 5-year study on the impact of trainings and deployments on special forces' testosterone levels, and the potential repercussions to readiness and long-term health.’

The operator syndrome rider didn’t survive reconciliation with the Senate and ultimately wasn’t included in the final NDAA. If it had, the Secretary of Defense would have had to brief members of congress this year on available treatments for low testosterone in the military health system and current protocols for testing and screening. The briefing was to look closely at how ‘high-stress operating environments are linked to low testosterone’.

The NDAA wasn’t the first time I’d heard testosterone raised as a potential problem for soldiers. As I mentioned in G.9: Getting Older, several of my peers at the pre-command course last year claimed testosterone, or ‘low-t’, was the cause of their declining fitness.

Most recently, when I raised my concern about the negative consequences of steroid culture in our formations, a reader commented that we needed to relook steroids, raising operator syndrome as a justification:

The Army says the total testosterone levels in healthy adult males range from 300 to 1000 ng/dL (10.4015 to 34.6717 nmol/L).1 We have folks in our formation with testosterone levels in the low 300 range and we are telling them to drive on. By now, we have all heard of operators syndrome, and we know it’s killing us.

I didn’t ‘know it was killing us’, so I decided to look into it and see what I could find out. Spoiler alert: not much.

Now I’ll caveat this post. I’m far from even a novice in medicine and there may also be more research out there. My cursory search didn’t find it, but I’m open to other articles and studies if anyone has any. Feel free to comment, DM me, or email me with and studies or data you find out there.

Principally, the issue at hand seems to be where one draws a line on low-t. The reason this is a Downrange Data post is because I think it offers an example of the value of data literacy. When you’re working with data, it can often be more useful to draw curved lines than straight ones.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, to the research!2

Frueh, et al. The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine

Dr. Christopher Frueh has gone on to write a book, but the original 2020 article, ‘”Operator syndrome”: A unique constellation of medical and behavioral health-care needs of military special operation forces’ is the foundation of the work. It’s also the article most commonly cited in other articles I found referencing operator syndrome. Frueh and his eight co-authors lay out a constellation of issues they see as concomitant with life in special operations:3

interrelated health and functional impairments including traumatic brain injury effects; endocrine dysfunction; sleep disturbance; obstructive sleep apnea; chronic joint/back pain, orthopedic problems, and headaches; substance abuse; depression and suicide; anger; worry, rumination, and stress reactivity; marital, family, and community dysfunction; problems with sexual health and intimacy; being “on guard” or hyper vigilant; memory, concentration, and cognitive impairments; vestibular and vision impairments; challenges of the transition from military to civilian life; and common existential issues.

This is based off consultations with ‘…over 50 special operation forces operators (and many spouses or girlfriends) over the past 6 years’. So what we have is a small (n=50ish) initial qualitative study. This does not automatically undercut Frueh and his team’s work. A lot of scientific research starts with small qualitative studies. These can be the critical first step in identifying a trend, which leads to further studies, in particular quantitative ones.

Frueh argues that while lots of veterans struggle with PTSD and other challenges post-deployment, Special Operations Forces (SOF) is different ‘because of the unique and extreme nature of their military service’ and thus operators ‘are likely not well served by current programs or traditional models of care’.

Now who is and is not an ‘operator’ is an old debate, and not one I’m eager to jump into. It is one that any future qualitative study of operator syndrome will need to wrestle with though. Frueh specifically cites the below units:

Army (Green Berets, Rangers, Delta, and other special mission units [SMUs]); Navy (Sea Air and Land Teams [SEALS] and Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen); Marines (Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command [MARSOC] and Force Recon); Air Force (Special Operation Squadrons, Combat Controllers, and Pararescue[PJs]); and explosive ordinance and demolition personnel who serve across branches. There are also personnel from other military and intelligence agencies (e.g., Central Intelligence Agency) who train and deploy with SOF.

This definition excludes Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs — who undergo their own selection — and many of the support soldiers who are assigned to these units, who are not always selected. Future studies could examine these populations to see what the divide is. The Rangers could provide an interesting pool to study since:

1. soldiers move into and out of the Ranger Regiment throughout their career and could potentially identify fluctuations over time.

2. like most SMUs, Rangers select all their support soldiers, which could provide another population to compare with non-selected support soldiers in other SOF units.

To be clear, when I use ‘Rangers’ I mean the the Ranger Regiment or ‘scrolled rangers’, not Ranger School graduates or ‘tabbed rangers’. This distinction will come up later.

Frueh proceeds to identify a list of challenges and potential causes for operator syndrome. And he lays out a great case for the impacts of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which is where the paper is on its firmest footing. SOCOM is already studying the impact and ways to mitigate TBI. This is in no small part because ‘anecdotal estimates suggest 85% of SOF operators experience TBI from training alone.’ TBI can have dramatic and varied impacts, though it is not clear that SOF suffers uniquely. Other MOSs like Field Artillery are just starting to come to terms with the impacts associated with high volumes over a career of firing large caliber weapons. Having served alongside tanks, I would not be surprised to learn tankers and armored infantry are in a similar state.

Frueh identifies TBI as a contributor to nearly every other operator syndrome symptom including sleep disturbance, sleep apnea, chronic joint and back pain, orthopedic problems, headaches, depression, suicide, anger issues, endocrine health, memory, and vision impairment. This concurs with a lot of other research, both qualitative and quantitative, about the impacts of TBI.

But, where’s the link to testosterone? That’s buried back in endnote 22. There’s just one single source. A small 2019 study on just 65 Navy Seals.

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Jensen, et al. Steroids.

Doctor Andrew Jensen, along with four other authors, published their study on 65 Navy SEALs in 2019.4 Participants were between 21 and 51 years old, with a range of years of service and number of deployments.5

The striking finding in this paper was 28 members of the study group (43%) had what the researchers defined as ‘levels below the clinically defined threshold for low-testosterone syndrome (LTS)’ or less than 10.4 nmol/L.

A clearly defined level for low-t wasn’t something I could find sources on. As you can see from the chart above, the researchers opted to draw a straight cutline at 10.4 to separate the study into two groups. Their source does list 10.4 as a limit, but I found other sources that listed lower values. The Australian Family Physician offered up a flow chart which suggested 8 nmol/L was an alternate floor:

Alternatively, I was able to find a comprehensive meta-study from 2014 which gave me the distribution of testosterone levels in men across their lives. Looking at data from sixteen different studies of testosterone they amassed a sample size of 10,458 men. When they plotted all those scores they found a distribution which looks like this:

What I like about this dataset is it provides the distribution of scores instead of relying on an arbitrary cut-off score. It’s the normal curve vs. a carpenters straight edge. Being a single standard deviation (SD) outside the normal band is noteworthy, but not highly exceptional. I don’t have the individual data for each of the 65 SEALs in Jensen’s study, but they all land within this yellow box:

Right off the bat, one disparity jumps out to me. There is a lot more range on the high end than the low side. Jensen’s paper cites a normal total testosterone range from ‘10.4 to 41.6’. But according to the 2014 paper, which has a sample size 160.9 times larger, a nmol/L of 41.6 is somewhere between two and three standard deviations above the mean. It’s actually so abnormal, there’s not enough data in their larger data set to draw a clear dividing line between the two. According to the 2014 study, a normal range for that age group is closer to 18, which is not far from the 17.6 of Jensen’s mean for the non-low testosterone age group.

If we use the SDs from the 2014 paper instead of using the Jensen 10.4 cutline we get a distribution that looks roughly like this:

Some of the low-t group fits within the normal distribution, but without the raw data from Jensen it’s hard to pin down precisely how many. The bulk of the rest are only one SD below it, with a couple hitting two SDs below. On the upper end, we see about 11 SEALs who are one to two SDs above the normal distribution. It’s not a perfect bell curve of results, but it doesn’t look egregiously different than a random sample of males would. Indeed, the SEAL distribution mirrors the 2014 study’s distribution, with a narrower range of scores below the normal than above it.

Jensen and his co-authors didn’t cite any clear cause as to why these operators have lower testosterone. But they found no correlation between operator life and low-t:

Plasma testosterone concentrations were not correlated with age or time as an operator in our study.

Our data also show that the non-LT subjects exhibited adaptations that would provide enhanced resiliency to the normal stress response. This is made evident due to the positive correlation between cortisol and testosterone in the non-LT group… To add to this unanticipated finding, comparisons between the oldest subjects (≥35yrs) and the youngest subjects (<35yrs) failed to demonstrate any differences in any of the hormones measured. In fact, the oldest subject (51 yrs of age;> 30 yrs of service; 12 deployments) had total testosterone (12.5nmol · L−1) and all other measured hormones fell within the normal range for an adult male. [emphasis added]

Jensen concedes there are multiple causes for hormonal imbalances, including improper nutrition:

a typical Western diet that is high in fat intake leads to an increase in circulating sex hormone binding globulin, which limits the amount of biologically active testosterone circulating in the body.

23 of the SEALs kept a food log which was analyzed for macro and micro-nutrient content. The study calculated on average the SEALs were expending 3,382 kcals a day while consuming only 2,587.8, for a net -813.1 kcals per day — a 24% deficit compared to what they were burning. This seems to indicate their dietary intake was not the one they typically live off, but the researchers did not expound on it. They did find their low-t group had a 28.8% higher protein / fat macronutrient ratio than the non low-t group. As they cite in the article:

Other correlative and experimental studies have shown that a diet with a high PRO/CHO macro nutrient ratio depresses testosterone levels.

However, they go on to state:

Interestingly, unlike other studies our results indicate that dietary fat composition is not influential on testosterone levels. It is possible that the differences observed between studies are due to variations in physical training workload of the subject populations.

Without the raw data, I can’t investigate this assertion much. However, the physical training workload brings me to one mistake the researchers made in their paper.

Jensen’s team acknowledges that intense physical training and inadequate nutrition can temporarily reduce testosterone. They cite a study done on students completing Ranger School which found, ‘a significant decrease in circulating testosterone to the point that the average for all subjects was below the threshold for LTS’. The mistake is when Jensen goes on to conflate Ranger School with Ranger Regiment training:

The participants in our study were a cross sectional sample of elite naval operators, with daily training regimens that are similar to those of the Army Rangers; however, the subjects in our study had already completed on average 7.7 ± 0.9 years of elite military training, which is much longer than the 8-week long selection course completed in the Army Ranger studies.

So, there’s a huge difference between the daily training regiments of Army Rangers (scrolled) and the ‘8-weeks’ — if you’re lucky — of training in Ranger School (tabbed). I’m sure the level of training across all of Frueh’s operator teams is intense and physical, regardless of tribe. But as a graduate of Ranger School and two selections, I can attest that Ranger School takes a very different toll on your body. The ‘daily training regimens’ the SEALs were conducting are not the same.

This is principally because, unlike all those training events and other selections, Ranger school is the only one that starves you. Back in 2003 when I graduated Ranger school, I was almost 30 pounds (13.6 kgs) lighter than when I started because for most of course I was subsisting off a single meal per day. Ranger school is still a very physically demanding course, but it is highly likely starvation is the leading cause for students' testosterone dropping in the course. Regardless, as the Ranger School study found, ‘testosterone levels rebounded to pre-training levels within 2–6 weeks of the training stimulus removal’.6

Jensen’s team grant their initial study has limitations, the principle one being it only captures a single point in the operator’s career.

It fails to indicate whether or not individuals had pre-existing LT prior to service.

If SOCOM wants to collect the data it would not be very difficult. In keeping with last week’s post, SOF operators are already subjected to extensive physicals before they can even attend a selection event; adding in testosterone testing could provide baselines. Currently, testosterone levels are not part of these physicals, but there’s barely any cost in one more blood draw.

Additionally, while many operators undergo semi-regular medical screenings, there is a smaller subset of them who have to undergo regular detailed physicals. Military Freefall and Dive qualified operators have to redo their physicals every five years. These are the most thorough health screenings I have had and would provide SOCOM an easy pool of certainly more than 650 operators to gather data from at barely any extra effort. This would be 10 times the Jensen data set and would canvas across all the SOF tribes, not just west coast SEALs.

More Data, Less Snakeoil

I’m not arguing that operator syndrome is not a thing. But I do think it needs more data before people can confidently claim it is ‘killing us’. Jensen and his team concede as much in their article. Which, to reiterate, was the lone citation about operator testosterone Frueh offered in his 2020 article. Frueh didn’t even test the testosterone levels of the subjects of his study.

So it’s not clear why Frueh chose to make the following brazen claim when he spoke with Task & Purpose and said 'By 35 years old, many special operators have the same testosterone levels of 80-to-90-year-old men.’ This is nowhere in his paper, nor in Jensen’s.

It is, ironically, in the 2014 Kelsey study I found, but that’s because after around age 24, it doesn’t appear that men’s testosterone drops off as significantly as reported. Instead they found, ‘an increased variation in total testosterone levels with advancing age after age 40 years’.

In the same vein, the AWC’s s Maximizing Senior Leader Health and Wellbeing found that most military leaders don’t have clinically low testosterone. Instead, they found those with just reduced testosterone should reexamine their lifestyle. Overwhelmingly it was a sedentary lifestyle which led to an increase in unhealthy levels of fat stores and reduced t-levels. While not clinically low-t, these officers could restart their own natural testosterone production by engaging in a better fitness regime, in particular one that forgoes long, repetitive cardiovascular training. Instead, soldiers should focus more on higher intensity workouts that move weight as they age.

Diet is just one thing that soldiers could be putting into their bodies that reduces their testosterone levels. If we take another look at that flow chat from the Australian Family Physician, we see:

While we don’t know what the current usage rate of steroids in SOF is, we do know it’s not zero.

The Navy will begin randomly testing its special operations forces for steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs beginning in November, taking a groundbreaking step that military leaders have long resisted. - PBS Newshour

Further study might determine there is an operator syndrome, though for now I think the science points much more reliably to the impacts of TBI. Discussing the Houses’ call for the study, Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-CA) stated, ‘Despite surveys of both veterans and active duty servicemembers indicating a potential link between the stress of military service and decreased testosterone levels, we still lack comprehensive data on this issue.’

He’s right, even if he doesn’t want to be. There’s a dearth of data to back up the ‘Operator syndrome’ concept. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it means it needs more data and study before service members jump both feet into the idea that testosterone is the problem and the solution.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure calls for more data will resonate much these days. Our country seems to be in love with ‘win the internet’ content that has no science to back it up. As a nation we are opting more and more to support social media snake oil peddlers who will sell us supplements and Himalayan pink sea salt instead of data driven health decisions. Blatant AI generated slop isn’t ‘formatting issues’, it’s us lying to ourselves.

I’ve been advocating for more data literate leaders for over a year now, but in a world where data itself doesn’t matter, literacy isn’t even an option.

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Also, as I’ve written elsewhere, BMI is a really bad metric, one that is not a great indicator for anything. In the Jensen study only the lowest SEAL BMI scores are barely inside the bounds ‘healthy’. The overwhelming majority are classified as ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’, despite being presumably fit operators.

My go-to first move for improving any unit I'm assigned to is ‘find ways to use the data we already have’. It’s not exactly superhuman innovation, but you’d be surprised how much return you can get on such (obviously) low hanging fruit.

Implementing new systems and gathering new data takes a lot of work. You’ve got to identify what you need and how you’re going to get it, then build a system to receive that data and a way to leverage it — we’re not hoarding data for data’s sake after all. You also need to find allies to help you roll out the new system and, if you’re not a complete idiot, you need to test out betas early to get customer feedback to improve the whole process. That all needs to be done before you get a single piece of new data. It’s also work you should keep doing as you gather the data, but that’s for another post.

This upfront time and effort cost is a large part of why most organizations don’t innovate much. Think about all the annoying frictions in your day: the password or PIN you constantly have to reenter, the ancillary or irrelevant information that you have to constantly retype into forms, the coversheet checklists that some faceless office makes you fill out before you can get your leave approved. All the dumb ‘we’ve always done it that way’ time wasters we all endure. Every. Single. Day.

Someone should fix them. Someone certainly can. Just not… us. Because we’re too busy. We’re sinking in a leaky boat and all we have to bail ourselves out is a sieve. There is no small irony in an organization too busy to stop wasting its time.

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‘I’m Going To Make You 100% More Efficient’

This is why my go-to move is to usually start with time wasters. I dive right into data my unit has but can’t seem to manage. When I became a battalion XO back in 2015, our personnel shop (S1) was notoriously bad. HR often gets a bad rap, mostly because a lot of their job is like ice-skating uphill. They’re never getting to the top, they’re just trying to stay as far off the bottom as they can. But I can freely admit, in 22+ years of army, that 2015 S1 shop was the worst I ever worked with. And when I became the XO, that made me part of the problem.

So we started with the easiest fix first: digitized awards. 22 years after the PDF was invented, our battalion S1 was still hand processing all the awards on paper. Mind you they weren’t being hand written. The awards were being filled out by soldiers on digital PDFs. But the S1 shop would only accept them as printed out copies, where upon the rest of the process was done entirely by hand.

Step one in our battalion S1 shop’s analogue process appeared to be: lose the paper copy. Well, that’s not entirely fair; they often skipped ahead and completed almost all the subsequent steps first. They’d get the award proofed and get the intermediate signatures done. But then, right at the end when the award was almost complete and just needed the commander’s signature, they would promptly lose the paper copy. Our S1 shop appeared to have an almost perfect ‘lose the award’ track record. Nearly every single award submitted got lost at least once, forcing everyone to start all over. Some were lost multiple times. I had to respect their consistency.

On my first day as XO, I sat down with the young captain in charge of the shop and told him there was no room for negotiation. Change was going to happen. ‘I’m going to make you 100% more efficient,’ I told him, which garnered a skeptical look. ‘No seriously, the math checks out’.

I mapped out how much time they spent processing the award on a white board. Then I drew a big sweeping arrow back to the beginning, showing how, when they lost the paper copy, they had to then spend all that time again. As I erased the ‘lose the paper copy’ arrow, I reran the numbers. ‘See? 100% improvement.’

To the poor captain’s credit, he did have one argument on his side. ‘The commander only reviews paper copies’.

‘That’s my problem, not yours’. And it was — one I mostly solved with assumption of command orders.1

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Turning Islands into Archipelagos

Most of the systems we built back in 2015 — the ones that tracked our manning, updated our PERSTAT, and tracked our budget — leveraged data the battalion already had.2 No one had to input new information, no need to reinvent any wheels. We had the answers we wanted already, we just needed to link them up better.

The S1 shop out in Oki did exactly that five years later, which I wrote about back in September.

Bryan and his team jumped into the problem with both feet and in no time had a no-code digital solution to our inprocessing. They did it all with no budget either, speeding up the whole process by leveraging data and, in particular, the data they already had. This allowed their S1 shop to skip wasting a ton of time doing rote and repetitive tasks. Instead they focused on doing things only humans could do.

They also innovated a lot of other admin processes. Once the boat’s no longer sinking — when you stop trying to bail yourself out with a sieve — everyone on your team gets a pause to look around. They often start wondering what else they can do. What else is wasting their time? What else is ripe for a rethink? The returns on time saved quickly start to compound.

But all this only helps out that unit. Plenty of units in the army are trying to reinvent the broken wheels in their own processes right now. It’s a start, but it’s not maximally efficient. What we really need is a way to better share these ideas and techniques. We need to establish trade routes between all these islands of innovation.

There’s been a lot of top down effort to improve innovation, with mixed results. There’s a lot of Field of Dreams-esque efforts that try to develop new ‘Innovation’ offices. Some are producing results, some aren’t. This is in part because these units are trying to add a new thing on top of an existing one. That can work, but it needs support and a commander to make it happen.

Meanwhile, USMC Colonel Jerome Greco suggests a great way to better capture and share all the military’s innovations. It’s cut from the same ‘leverage what you’re already doing’ cloth I’ve been using. His insight is to use the command inspection program (CIP).

For those who aren’t familiar, every unit in the military, regardless of service, gets a visit from some sort of CIP team. These happen at least once during a two-year command. A cabal of different staff section inspectors comes out and proceeds to inspect your battalion on literally hundreds of checklists. All your administrative stuff, security, jump logs, maintenance logs, safety programs, anti-terrorism, SHARP; literally all the things. When the inspection is done, they give you an 100+ slide executive summary of their findings. That’s the executive summary version.

When the CIP team came out to Oki, Bryan’s S1 shop drew special compliment. Not only had they smoked the inspection side of the visit, the CIP team was genuinely surprised by the innovations the Oki S1 team had created. Unfortunately, aside from the compliments, there was no system in place to steal those good ideas and replicate them across the rest of the regiment. Too often Oki was an island on its own (pun intended).

But as Greco suggests, it wouldn’t take much to leverage the existing CIP process to capture how units are innovating. Currently, most units see these CIPs as largely annoying: inspections with hundreds of ❌ and ✅. What if they were instead caravans that could bring with them the latest great ideas? What if in addition to just telling you what your unit wasn’t doing well, these same CIP teams became innovation talent scouts who promulgated the best of our ideas while simultaneously championing the units that made them?

We don’t really need to add anything to the existing process, which is what makes Greco’s idea such a great tweak. He’s right to caution about the concerns around ‘innovation theater’, which we already see in some of the bespoke innovation teams units have assembled. But CIP mitigates a lot of this risk by actually capturing staff level innovations.

And the CIP process is examining a lot of the exact time wasting systems that are our worst time vampires. Out in Oki I fought, and lost, the idea that we still need to keep paper jump logs. CIP cited a regulation I couldn’t overrule; but I can’t be the first commander to argue that if I can swipe an ID card at the chow hall, I shouldn’t be felling forests worth of trees just to keep paper copies of what should be a digital logbook.

Read Greco’s whole article. He has a lot more than just that CIP idea in there. He explains how to do more than just label one of those Greek columns 'Innovation' on your newly minted vision statement. He lays out solid outlines for both the different kinds of innovations and, critically, how to create the culture and systems that actually generate them. And he backs up all of this with solid research and sources.

Spoiler alert: commanders play an outsized role. It’s on commanders to get their team’s the time savings they need to start innovating.

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I had a spark of insight while I was sitting in a room of fellow Colonels and Navy Captains last month.

We were in a pro-dev course designed to help military officers manage our transition into the senior leaders who are charged with driving change in our militaries. During a block of instruction on future tech trends, it became clear pretty quickly the majority of the students lacked experience with current AI/ML tools, despite these tools being available to experiment with for free since 2022. The questions my fellow students asked implied many were looking for excuses to continue their ignorance.

‘It all just hallucinates, right?’

‘I heard there’s a study that people who use AI are less informed.’

When the instructor asked who had used an LLM or AI tool in the last month, only a couple hands went up. Most of the fellow O6s in the class had not actually used any of them at all.1

Meanwhile, when I log on to NSTR each morning — where there are three separate channels covering AI/ML topics — the junior officers quickly lose me with their depth of understanding about not just how to train models but also the convoluted process to get approvals to actually use them on government networks. This is what prompted me to sketch out this chart in my notebook:

This is a problem. The population of officers empowered to drive change lack the information the army needs to guide it toward the future. This deficit is a result of the military’s promotion system, which promotes off time in service, not knowledge. The underlying theory is the longer you’ve been around, the more relevant experience you’ve amassed, and thus the more rank you justify. In some cases this works exactly as expected. But what happens when the experience you have isn’t the experience we need? What happens when there’s a different room, filled with younger or different people who have more relevant experience?

In the chart above, if you replace AI with ‘data literacy’ you’ll see a similar distribution. Or, alternatively, let’s imagine a chart of knowledge and experience in making and fighting with cheap drones. On that chart just about any junior Ukrainian NCO is on the far right end of the distribution and pretty much all the US Army officer corps is sitting around zero. The average trench in eastern Ukraine has more drone knowledge and experience than the entire US Army combined.

More and more of the skills we need as an army aren’t found within the ranks of our leadership. This is particularly concerning because the pace of change isn’t slowing down, or even staying static. It’s accelerating. We don’t need colonels to be experts in AI, or data, or cheap drones, but we desperately need them to be voraciously curious in these fields. We can’t sit back and wait for PME to educate them, we need relentlessly self-driven learners.

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‘Whatcha reading for?’

The O6 grade is the rank charged with driving change in the military. But in too many rooms full of O6s over the last year, there has been a distinct lack of curiosity. Indeed, when I shared the above chart on LinkedIn, I was surprised by people who downplayed the problem.

One self-described ‘strategic thinker’ provides an example of the malaise:

Is the Colonel's job to be curious or to lead and mentor people they lead to be curious? Shouldn't they be the ones cultivating curiosity not necessarily the ones with the preponderance of curiosity?

I’ve also seen charts intended to map the volume of learning an officer does over their career. These typically suggest that ‘learning’ diminishes to a nearly invisible slice by the time you reach O6. The army’s manual on developing leaders, FM 6-22, don’t seem to disagree. The only mention of the concept in FM 6-22 is ‘curiosity’, which is only given a single passing comment in a table about self-development:

The pervasiveness of this incurious mentality is pretty disturbing. What’s worse, because of how we promote, the attitude that a senior officer doesn’t need to be curious leeches down the grades until you have even junior officers denigrating reading as some ‘intellectual’ pursuit. It’s a great Bill Hicks bit, but as a second lieutenant sitting atop my Bradley in Korea I actually had a senior officer walking by ask me ‘What are you reading for?’

The army doesn’t naturally produce curious leaders. If anything, it tends to breed them out of our formations. Einstein once quipped, ‘It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.' You’ll find no more formal education than the one the military provides. We reduce everything we can to drill and rote, and rarely reward innovation. This attitude would work fine if war were a static thing that never changes, some ancient and unchanging art. But war relentlessly evolves. The military instead tends to discourage free-thinking, while almost never punishing conformity, even when it leads to the deaths of thousands.

Contrary to the above cited excerpt from FM 6-22, we need leaders who cannot ever satisfy their curiosity. Returning to Einstein, ‘The important thing is not to stop questioning; never lose a holy curiosity’.

The army probably can’t run on every solider constantly questioning everything, but we need curiosity desperately in our senior-most leaders. Unfortunately, the military has a plethora of incurious leaders these days. Last spring, it was a four-star general who told a room full of us future battalion and brigade command teams not to worry about drones because ‘Our tanks drive fast’. Incurious leaders presume we don’t need to worry about drones because ‘They've yet to meet a full spectrum, robust defense’. Incurious leadership is why most of our formations still only move at the speed of PowerPoint instead of data.

It actually takes a lot of things for curiosity to thrive. You need time, and safety. Curiosity doesn’t really bloom until you’ve satisfied the first few layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Mentorship can be invaluable. Not everyone gets these when they’re young. But colonels are sitting at the top of that pyramid.

The Walled Garden

There’s no way to move laterally into the senior grades of the military. Colonels don’t need to fret about some younger, brighter officer with new experience coming in from their flank to take their job. The only way to be a colonel is to be a lieutenant colonel first, and a major before that, and all the way down the line back to a second lieutenant. Senior ranks are a walled garden. Too few colonels, looking around themselves and their peers, take the time to ponder where the rest of their peers ended up.

Those of us who stay in and promote in the army tend to think we’re the best of our peers. We imagine a bell curve of army talent like this:

One of my favorite army peers redrew this chart for me:

I’ve done plenty of things to piss people off throughout my career, but nothing has ever had a more visceral and emotional response than when I show senior officers that chart. Colonels and generals get really angry just at the suggestion it conveys.

Another friend of mine, Zach Griffiths, recently published a great piece which included the line: ‘You Don’t Need Permission to Be Curious’. Since I was already working on this post, I reached out and we had a wide-ranging discussion about the role curiosity plays in an army career. He’s actually the one who prompted me to check and see what doctrine said — or didn’t — about curiosity. As we talked I brought up my recent post where I decried the ‘maximum standards’ the army uses for our fitness tests.

Zach responded with a great insight. ‘We have it backwards in the army. Imagine a business or sport where there was an age minimum to be a leader and a performance maximum.’

The war college tries hard to beat the drum about how we need to be a ‘lifelong learner’. They do it so much that it kind of gives up the game. Maybe because trying to convince an officer in their mid-40s to suddenly be curious is a fool’s errand.

As an institution, the military can actually seem to be surprised to discover other organizations learn. I’ve sat in far too many briefings where someone tried to sound profound by saying ‘You have to understand, ____ is a learning organization’. Al Qaeda, The Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram; insert your enemy, I’ve heard it for all of them.

All organizations are learning organizations. It’s half of what organizations do: they capture, share, and improve knowledge. Denny’s is a learning organization. Non-learning organizations die out, or get bought out and sold off. That is unless they live in a walled garden.

‘What got you here won’t get you there’ is another refrain we get told a lot at both the senior service colleges and at the myriad of brigade level pre-command courses. I think it’s absolutely true, but the cautionary tale is there in the telling. Many of us won’t make the turn. We’ll stick to our experience, retreading over what we know instead of embracing the discomfort of not knowing.

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Michelangelo and the Marble

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

The quote is almost certainly apocryphal, especially since it never showed up anywhere until three centuries after Michelangelo’s death. But it reflects how a lot of officers in the army think of ‘great leaders’ — junior officers of unmatched raw talent that just need the rough edges rounded off with experience. The idea is the great leader is born, not made.

Except that’s not how we grow as leaders. The process is much more additive than subtractive. We’re not marble busts, we’re seeds. We have kernels inside us, but we need a lot of external resources to germinate. We need feeding and watering and time and a ton of luck.

My early lieutenant years, in particular that one in Ar Ramadi, fundamentally changed me as a person, never mind as an officer. Perhaps the most impactful thing I left Al Anbar with was a deeply uncomfortable awareness of just how much I did not know. I spent an inordinate amount of my time during the infantry captain's course in the library, acquainting myself with the wealth of knowledge about insurgencies within that heretofore I was unaware of. I had graduated the infantry officer basic course in 2004 with the idea that there was a new thing going in Iraq called ‘4th generation warfare’, only to come back in 2006 and discover plenty of books on insurgency, many going back a hundred years.2

Curiosity has been key to my self-development ever since. Not everything we need to learn is cutting edge. That’s one of my favorite things about the articles Zach writes. He doesn’t always write about some novel or original idea he’s come up with. Instead, Zach continuously digs through the archives of lost knowledge — the lessons written down but not learned — and unearths the secret to winning a battle on the Polish-Lithuanian border, how politicization threatens our profession, or the ultimate recipe for an old fashioned. That is when he’s not campaigning to change the army’s culture to one where we read and think and — of course — write. Zach is a deeply curious person.

There are others out there. A junior field grade recently published with MWI ‘Encouraging Self-Development in Data Literacy’. Meanwhile, a fellow USMC Colonel published a great piece about innovation. More than just saying we need more, he laid out solid outlines for different kinds of innovation, and critically, ways create the culture and systems that actually generate them. Spoiler alert, commanders play an outsized role.

We can’t simply outsource innovation to mavericks on the fringes of the professional community, important as they may be in the process. Innovation requires the commitment of credible and respected senior officers—consummate insiders—to drive it from ideation to implementation.

The army is trying to encourage the uptake of data, but I think the efforts are trapped in a sort of valley-of-death. The Army War College recently announced their two-day executive course “Data to Decision in Warfighting” (DDWF). The stated goal is ‘to equip senior army leaders with essential data literacy skills for warfighting decisions’. I don’t think you can learn data literacy in two days. You certainly can’t learn much more than you could all on your own if you were just curious.

Dunning–Kruger Colonels

If anything, I’d suggest officers should be more curious as they promote, not less. After all, a brand new lieutenant lacks the experience to help guide their curiosity. This is why we give them officer and NCO mentors. Those mentors help guide that curiosity and keep lieutenants from killing themselves, or worse, their soldiers. But as you grow older, you have the benefit of experience to steer self-discovery.

Meanwhile, as you promote, the things that you know — and critically what you don’t know — impact an ever larger group of people. The impact radius of an incurious colonel can be an entire brigade.

Coming back to that ‘strategic thinker’ above: how is leaving curiosity to the junior officers going to help that incurious senior leader decide which equipment to acquire, or how doctrine must change? Having worked in the the G8 — the army’s department dedicated to funding, fielding, and equipping — I can assure you, no one was checking with the captains on which equipment we should be buying.

Agency magnifies the impact of curiosity. And promotion increases your agency in the military. Colonels have much greater power to pursue things that interest them and the rank to actually drive their organizations in those direction.

Think about the best business leaders out there. Are they incurious? Does Eric Schmidt, who is 70 years old, strike you as incurious? I’ve listened to Nilay Patel interview easily a hundred different CEOs on his Decoder podcast, and not a single one has ever said ‘curiosity is someone else’s job’. The difference here is, outside the military, you can’t survive as an incurious leader.

But the lack of curiosity is not uniquely a military problem. Other fields, in particular those ‘professions’ with entrenched hierarchies based on time of service, suffer from similar stagnation. David Epstein recently introduced me to the ‘Einstellung effect’ in a post he shared on his substack. He raised a 2016 study that showed why this led to more experienced therapists being worse at their jobs:

“There’s a lot of research on whether or not therapy works. We find over and over again that it works. It does pretty well, it’s got good effect sizes, all of that. The problem, as near as we can tell, is that more experienced therapists just do not have better outcomes than newer therapists…The best piece of research I’ve ever seen on it was 2016 (Goldberg), it actually suggested that therapeutic outcomes got slightly worse as the clinician got more experienced.”

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Making a Wicked Learning Environment More Kind

Last month, I had the pleasure of joining Forrest Hanson on “Being Well,” a mental health-focused podcast that he often co-hosts with his father, psychologist Rick Hanson. At one point, we discussed how professionals who specialize very narrowly can sometimes become rigid and stop improving…

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a year ago · 80 likes · 44 comments · David Epstein

Why? As Epstein argues in his post in some environments, ‘…people often gain confidence without gaining skill — a dangerous combination. Perhaps that can help explain why experience alone doesn’t predict better outcomes in therapy.’ Experience can be hugely impactful. Experience is why I don’t ascribe to that Michelangelo Marble model of leadership. Experience adds to who we are. Its the soil and sunshine and time that grow us as leaders. But you still have to ask yourself, experience in what?

Experience is also what gets you off of ‘mount stupid’ and descending into the ‘valley of despair’ on the Dunning-Kruger curve. Only curiosity gets you climbing back out the other side.

I have over 20 years of experience. Like many of my peers, much of it is focused on counter-insurgency. You’ll hear veterans of my generation constantly brag about our ‘21 years of combat’. But 21 years of ‘experience’ didn’t teach us how to fight a peer military. This was laid bare when in early 2020 I sat in a JOC while a barrage of ballistic missiles were fired at US bases in Iraq. My entire career, starting with that first assignment in Korea and running through my command in Okinawa, every operational war plan I’ve been assigned to begins with expected ballistic missile barrages. And yet, in early 2020, no headquarters in the theater was ready for ballistic missiles.

Curiosity matters more, not less, as we age and promote. Our colonel class is selectively bred, and our generals are all picked from among the walled garden we insulate them in. You can’t expect a trait not present in the former to suddenly appear in the latter. As leaders, we owe it to our soldiers to be curious. To never sit back and rest on our ‘combat experience’ as an excuse to not know something.

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I have a lot of respect for retired colonel Michael McGurk. Last month the army announced we were ditching the standing-power-throw, aka the ‘yeet’, as part of the new Army Fitness Test (AFT).1 Mike quickly hammered out an editorial in the Army Times defending the event and decrying the hole in our fitness assessments it leaves behind.

He is literally the only person I know who has mourned the loss of the yeet. I know more people who defended the cheese and veggie omelet MRE, which is objectively the worst MRE ever made.2 I have to give props to Mike, who culminated 45 years of service with 13 years working on the ACFT and H2F programs. He had a big hand in changing the army’s definitions of fitness. He didn’t have to defend the yeet, but he stuck to his guns. I like a man of principle.

And his overall arguments aren’t wrong.

The event evaluates explosive power, a crucial physical attribute for tasks ranging from close-quarters combat and scaling obstacles to transitioning quickly from prone positions… As a simple, reliable and low-maintenance test, it not only measures explosive power but also integrates balance, coordination, flexibility, speed and agility — elements indispensable to soldier performance.

The AFT now has suffers from this gap in its overall assessment. Soldiers get one rep of that quick transition from prone in the sprint-drag-carry (SDC); but just once, right at the start. The deadlift assesses maximum strength, but if you’re using explosive power you’re doing them wrong and likely hurting your back. Please stop. And though the SDC does work coordination, speed, and agility as you transition from event to event, it doesn’t challenge flexibility much, which many soldiers struggle with. I did for most of my career, until I started doing yoga.

But here’s where I think Mike goes wrong:

The standing-power-throw draws upon principles of kinesiology to approximate the functional movements soldiers rely on daily — movements that demand synergy between force, speed and agility. [emphasis added]

Contrary to Mike’s assertion above, the standing-power-throw’s movement doesn’t replicate anything soldiers actually do. It doesn’t really replicate anything non-soldiers do either. Even when civilians throw heavy things for distance, they don’t yeet them backwards over their head.

Because nobody power yeets a weight over their goddamn head! Go watch a video of a caber toss or a hammer throw.

To be good at the yeet, soldiers had to dedicate time and energy to a task they didn’t need anywhere else in their jobs. Since most soldiers only take their fitness test twice a year, the standing-power-throw skillset was always going to struggle to get the repetitions and sets that would actually drive improvement.3 Instead, the movement atrophies with lack of use. Soldiers quickly plateau - not at their actual explosive power limit, but at a much lower, artificial one.

Units don’t typically enjoy spending their limited training time on a skillset that doesn’t help them do their job. Deadlifts, in contrast, help every soldier learn to pick things up better. Regardless of your job, everyone picks things up. The sprint-drag-carry simulates a lot of movements we all get called up to do randomly, regardless of our MOSs. The leg luck helps soldiers master the agility to climb obstacles. The plank… yeah I don’t really have anything to defend the plank. It helps soldiers practice for all the ‘hurry-up and wait’ they’re going to do throughout their day?

Units don’t have a ton of time. Every unit I’ve ever served in had more 350-1 requirements than they actual had hours in their calendar.4 Units in the army have to decide what will and won’t get done with the 168 hours they get each week. They need to prepare for their wartime mission and to also be prepared for the other missions they know they might get. Things that easily translate into benefits for multiple tasks get done, which is why fitness should be a priority. But practicing the skills you need to excel on throwing a 10 pound ball backwards over your head only four times a year?

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The Pillars of Power: The Clean and The Snatch

I was actually doing snatches this morning while I was drafting this post. You won’t find a better expression of ‘explosive power… balance, coordination, flexibility, speed and agility’ than the snatch. But, the army should not use the snatch to asses soldiers' fitness for the same reasons we shouldn’t use the yeet.

Snatches are one of the two families of Olympic lifts. The other is cleans. Both are built around the very normal task of taking a weight from the ground to overhead. Cleans do it in stages: first lifting the weight from the ground to the shoulders, then through variants of the jerk or the press to get the bar to full extension. Snatches go from ground to full extension without any pause in the middle. They are the ultimate technical lift, requiring you to execute six different movement phases in a single rapid, but specifically timed, sequence. The reason you can clean more raw weight than you can snatch is because of just how meticulous the latter lift is.

I love the snatch. When you hit it right it feels like poetry and power all at once.5 But it takes a ton of work to learn and an equal amount of work to maintain. That coaching and that training time are the two things the army lacks. That same shortcoming was what killed the standing-power-throw.

The ACFT was designed as a field test, not a laboratory test, and to have the ability for minimally trained graders to measure test results.

The army has struggled to teach senior NCOs and officers to properly deadlift, though it has been making slow and steady progress. But there will never be enough time on any unit’s calendar to train snatches, never mind enough certified trainers to coach the movement. The standing-power-throw suffered from the same problem.

If you do a snatch poorly, you’re highly likely to hurt yourself. Aside from just the potential damage to your muscles and spine that a bad pull can get you, you are throwing a heavy weight directly over your head. If your balance is off, that bar is going to come down somewhere.

The standing-power-throw is a similar lift, where timing and technique have to be spot on to maximize the result. I’ve seen plenty of soldiers release the ball way too late, resulting in a shorting line drive ball straight down the field. I’ve also seen plenty of soldiers release the ball too early, launching it basically straight up in the air. Both demonstrated great explosive power, but in neither case will it show up in their score.

The standing-power-throw ended up not getting us great data on our soldier’s actual explosive power. Not for lack of trying though. The researchers at RAND cited the increased risks of injury with the standing-power-throw, which is what led to the army dropping it in the AFT. Apparently a lot of soldiers out there were really going full send.

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We Still Need Explosive Power

While I disagree with Mike about the utility of the standing-power-throw, I do completely agree we now have an ‘explosive power’ shaped hole in our fitness assessment. This is concerning because as the old army adage goes, ‘you get what you inspect’. The APFT army didn’t build the kind of fitness we needed when we only tested push-ups, sit-ups, and run. I see a lot of risk in leaving that explosive power and agility gap there in our annual assessment.

In SOF we often use force plates to assess both our maximum strength and explosive power, as well as diagnose problematic asymmetries. They’re actually great training tools, but as Mike concedes in his editorial, most units don’t have access to them at scale. Deployed units definitely don’t.

A 2017 Study in the Journal of Applied Biomedical Research confirms medicine ball throws are reliable for upper- and lower-body power assessment, requiring less setup than force plate-based tests.

After the last five years of turmoil, congressional intervention, and revision, I don’t think the army is going to make any further adjustments to the AFT any time soon.6 That said, if I were the Secretary of the Army for a day, I’d tweak the sprint-drag-carry and roll out the sprint-clean-carry.

What is the Sprint-clean-carry? In lieu of the 50 meter 90 pound drag, you swap in heavy sandbag cleans. It’s a simple swap that can fill the explosive power gap, while also better replicating real soldiers’ lived experience. I’ve never needed to drag anything 50 meters in my job outside of the ACFT, so I don’t know how critical the drag was to the overall ACFT assessment Mike and his team built. Then again, I also never had to run 50 meters in an awkward sideways shuffle either.

But have I ever had to pick up some oddly shaped heavy-ass thing, throw it onto my shoulder and run with it? Lots of times.

That awkward weight and balance is actually one thing that’s a great benefit of heavy medball and sandbag cleans. Most the things we lift in life aren’t as perfectly balanced as a Oly lifting bar. It’s actually much more normal to pick up irregular shaped things from the ground, which engages a lot more of your balance, coordination, flexibility, and agility.

The sprint-clean-carry would also solve a logistical problem. No more drags means no need for sleds nor a need for expensive turf fields — though most units I’ve served in have been doing the SDC on grass just fine. Instead, units just need to get ahold of some gym sandbags, which actually cost less than the current drag sleds. Deployed units can pretty easily pack these away, or improvise with duffel bags and real sandbags.

Your unit needs the explosive power fitness and you should be finding ways to incorporate these kinds of cleans into your workouts. In a sprint-clean-carry, I’d probably have the soldiers clean the bag / ball at each end before running 25 meters under the load. You can scale the weight for the clean too, so combat MOSs have to pick up heavier ones than gen-pop.

The yeet going away is, in my opinion, a good thing. But Mike’s right: we need to prioritize explosive power, balance, and flexibility. In a perfect world we’d have a fitness assessment that leverages familiar movements to test our soldiers on these skills. In the gap, it’s up to the leaders across the army to make training and assessing these a priority. Mike’s call to ‘evaluate soldiers holistically, bridging the gap between physical fitness and combat readiness’ is spot on. For now, leaders need to be the ones making sure they add a supplemental assessment to their training. One that ‘reflects the demands of modern warfare’.

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1

My editor has hated the word ‘yeet’ since the first time I used it and this is the last post I’m allowed to use it. So we’re eulogizing both. RIP, yeet.

This is a long post, but I’ve put in short cuts for those in a hurry. I’ve written a quick summary of the changes of fitness standards, as well as a longer detailed breakdown of how each event’s scales have adjusted. Up front I’ll quickly cover the change to how the army is administering the new AFT. I will also lay out where I see the most likely risks in implementation. As I did with my ‘Where Data Meets Gains’ series, I’ve also included a suggested workout, ‘Peanut’, at the end to help those who need to get ready. I can’t think of a better workout to get yourself ready for the new standards, so I highly recommend you check it out.

What Changed?

First up, the AFT has new scores for all MOSs, but the biggest change is we now have two tiers: combat MOSs and non-combat MOSs (which I’ll also refer to as gen-pop).

The AFT combat standard applies to specific combat AOC/MOS... It is sex-neutral and age-normed, requiring a minimum score of 60 points per event and an overall minimum score of 350 points.

The combat MOSs are:

11A, 11B, 11C, 11Z, (Infantry)
12A, 12B (Combat Engineers)
13A, 13F (Field Artillery officers and Fire Support Specialists, but not gun bunnies, FDCs, MLRS, nor {of note} their SGMs)
18A, 180A, 18B, 18C, 18D, 18E, 18F, 18Z (Special Forces - Green Berets have the only Warrant Officers subject to the combat MOS AFT standard)
19A, 19C, 19D, 19K, & 19Z (Tankers)

Starting in June, the army is going to counsel every soldier on the new standards. Those in combat MOSs need to meet the new AFT 350 minimum. That’s either 70 points in each event, or you need to make up points for any event where you dip down to 60 points. Those whose on-record ACFT score doesn’t meet the new standard will be counseled separately. They will also be given a chance to retake a ‘first assessment’ AFT before August. Those who pass can go on about their day, safe in the knowledge they met the standard.

However, if a solider does not get a 350+, they will be flagged in the personnel system and have until December to improve or reclass. The specifics of reclassing get complicated and I’m not going to cover them here. Get ahold of your career counselor or HRC rep if you have specific questions. Soldiers may take an optional AFT in December if they want to stay in their MOS; however, if they fail, voluntary reclassing won’t be an option after. The army is looking for soldiers in 17 specific MOSs — see the table in the footnotes.1 Your career counselor / HRC branch rep is the best source for what’s available to you.

One carve out is for those combat MOS officers MAJ to COL and SF Warrants who do not pass. They ‘will remain in branch and serve in positions not associated with combat’. I haven’t found specifics for which positions those are, but command is definitely not one of them. This rule may not apply to Green Berets, since USASOC recently issued a directive revoking SF Tabs for those Green Berets who fail to pass the ACFT and meet height and weight standards. There is also some language on how to manage profiles, so if you have a physical profile, get with your medical leadership on how to proceed.

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Why the Change?

This part is key, so I’m going to quote the directive a couple times:

The army analyzed existing ACFT performance data (over 800,000 tests) to identify ways to raise standards for specific combat areas of concentration (AOC), military occupational specialties (MOS), and the army as a whole. Further insights were gained through a pilot program in May and June 2024, where approximately 45,000 soldiers took a practice ACFT with elevated standards. This analysis informed army senior leaders' decision to increase physical fitness standards army wide.2

The reason I think this is key is because the army botched this in 2018 with the ACFT roll-out, when there was no clear communication plan executed. The directive clearly orders all leaders to provide ‘clear and prompt communication of the new AFT standards and necessary soldier actions to achieve them’.

The army seems to understand how bad they rolled out the ACFT, and the directive even sees the need to reach out beyond just the command channels.

Along with podcasts like “From The Green Notebook” and “MOP and MOEs.” Social media influencers, both internal and external, should be included in communication efforts.

Anyone looking to amplify the messaging is directed to use ‘#AFTReady2025’.

The reason for the AFT change for all soldiers is:

‘The five-event AFT is designed to increase warfighting readiness, reduce injury risk, and enhance the physical performance of the force.’

Those who read my summary of the RAND study can see why the army ditched the overhead ball throw, since it was the one event associated with higher injury risk. The change to combat MOS standards was assessed in that same study.

‘The AFT, informed by RAND analysis, is designed to improve readiness, enhance lethality, and reinforce the warrior ethos.’

The one thing the army hasn’t communicated is why these combat standards are ‘age normed’. If the rigors of combat don’t discriminate on gender, then they damn well don’t take age into account either. The army has a reason, and they should lay it out.

I think the AFT change is a welcome one. But I also think our army culture also needs to change. We need to accept and communicate that being the fittest doesn’t automatically mean being smartest or a best leader. For most of my career, we bred officers and senior NCOs who thought run times were the best yardstick for leadership. I personally served under two commanders who overtly used running to assess leadership talent. Both are now felons.

Combat MOSs are getting a higher physical requirement because those jobs have higher physical demands. But that doesn’t make a non-combat soldier in any way inferior. We have different jobs and when it comes to the highest levels of leadership, strategic thinking matters more than your deadlift. We already tend to breed short-sighted tactical corgis in the combat MOSs. Making them yoked won’t make them any better at strategy.

Watch the Leaders

The reason I’ve taken time to bang the drum on the messaging is because leaders botched it so badly last time. The ACFT has been out for six years and yet soldiers in last year’s RAND study were still found to be unfamiliar with the movements.

Leaders failed. They failed to make the change in large part because those same leaders had the most to ‘lose’ in the change from the APFT to the ACFT. You can see this clearly in the ACFT standards, which were adjusted in 2023 from the original 2019 ones based off thousands of soldiers' results. There is a sharp drop off in the 37+ crowd who opted to not adapt to the new fitness test, weighted down heavily by senior NCOs and officers who didn’t want to learn a new form of fitness.

This time specifically those senior leaders in combat MOSs are the ones whose standards have been raised. I detail the specifics below, but the ages that see the biggest increase in combat MOS standards are the 37-56 year old cohort. We need to pay attention because the people with the most power in the army are also the ones most likely to be impacted by the change.

The directive takes aim directly at leadership:

Effective 1 January 2026, promotable combat branch warrant officers and officers, in the grade of WO1 to CW5, MAJ to COL, who do not achieve a qualifying AFT score will be flagged and subsequently withheld from promotion. Effective 1 January 2026, officers must meet the combat standard to be eligible for command.

The new standards are not excessive and I think most combat MOS soldiers are already exceeding them. I recalculated all my previous ACFT scores and ended up with an average of less than a single point difference, principally because I’d adopted the plateau mindset for the deadlift I decried last week.

But I do know some fellow Green Beret LTCs, COLs, and SGMs / CSMs who will struggle to meet the new 350 standard. Some of them are in or about to take command. If this is true for SF, then it is certainly true for the other combat MOSs. And we can identify those leaders at risk right now. Because the army already has all our CAP / SMAP ACFT scores.

The directive doesn’t just apply to command teams:

Soldiers at PME about to graduate this month who do not meet the standard will have a graduation waiver that states as such.

For all those soldiers like me at the Army War College or equivalent, or those at ILE and the Sergeants Major Academy, the army already has our ACFT on file. The army already knows if we’re meeting the AFT standard.

Effective 1 January 2026, promotable combat branch officers, in the grade of 2LT to CPT, who do not achieve a qualifying AFT score will be flagged and subsequently withheld from promotion. Effective 1 January 2026, promotable combat branch warrant officers and officers, in the grade of WO1 to CW5, MAJ to COL, who do not achieve a qualifying aft score will be flagged and subsequently withheld from promotion.

General officers, who no longer have branches, are likely not going to be impacted. But by the letter of the policy, CSMs who wish to retain their MOS must meet the standard.

An overdue reckoning

I’m sure the bulk of the media attention will be focused on the impact the new AFT combat standard will have on females. But that’s not where I’ll be watching. Because the real question isn’t how many females can meet the combat MOS standard. It’s how many males can?

I have never had the data, but I long wondered if doubts about that question were what really drove some of the resistance to letting females try out for combat arms. After all, if you firmly believed that females could never meet or exceed the physical standards, then you could just sit back behind that impervious wall of standards.

Instead, for years we saw a lot of male soldiers decry even letting females attempt. Some people were so committed to the idea females couldn’t meet the standard that when women did meet and exceed the standard, they refused to accept it, claiming ‘they changed the standard’.

There are a few select units that can hold incredibly high standards and they have one trait in common: they are very small. As an example, the Ranger Regiment still insists all their officers and NCOs have a ranger tab, even their support soldiers. They struggle at times to fill low density MOSs, but when you only need four Ranger qualified mess NCOs, you might be able to find them across the entire army.

Green Berets will often whinge about how the SF Regiment doesn’t hold a similar high standard for our support MOSs. But the math breaks down when you realize there are five times as many SF groups as Rangers. When I was a battalion XO, I found I needed a property book officer a lot more than I needed an airborne property book officer.3

But the infantry isn’t small. Despite their fewer numbers, the tanker corps is pretty big too.4 When you need thousands of infantry to fill the squads, the tension between quality and quantity starts to grow. In my first infantry battalion, there were a lot of infantryman who could not pass the new 70 minimums for today’s AFT. If you deny females for not meeting the standard, you have to potentially cut all of those males who couldn’t perform either. There are likely a lot of them across the active army and in particular, the national guard.

I think that’s a big part of why people didn’t want to let women show they could exceed the standards. Well, women spent the last decade doing exactly that. Now a lot of fragile male egos are about to find themselves having to put up or shut up.

What’s the risk?

I’m not arguing that the army is wrong to set a higher standard for soldiers’ fitness — I have already written about my support for higher combat MOS standards. But there will be an inevitable tension when combat MOS soldiers don’t meet the new standard.

Because one advantage of the AFT and ACFT over the APFT is you can’t just pencil whip it anymore. It used to be easy to just say ‘Oh Gary and Rick gave me one the other day. I got a 277’.5 ACFTs and AFTs take logistics. People see you take them and they know when you didn’t.

I have also served in units that tried to navigate the tension between a high standard and manning. Leadership is harder in these units, because there’s increased pressure to lie. Numbers get fudged. When the people with the most power are the ones with the most to lose, there’s an even greater likelihood of undue influence. That’s when a commander or sergeant major reaches down to change a score to protect their career.

And in the worst cases, the culture of the unit comes to condone things like steroid use. Soldiers do not need to use steroids to meet the combat minimums. Indeed, no challenge the army has given me in 22 years warranted using steroids. I can say that until I’m blue in the face, but I think the army needs to have a plan to test randomly for steroid use among combat arms units to prevent this culture from infesting our formations.

AFT Cliff Notes:

The thorough dive is in supplemental post, but here’s the quick facts on the AFT you need to know. I’m not going to focus in on the max end of the scale. This is in part because, as I detailed above, the new standards don’t move the max needle much. I still don’t think the army should use max standards, but I’ll have to keep that fight going for another day. I’m also not going to cover the 57-62+ crowd because, though I don’t know how many active duty combat MOS soldiers there are over 56, I’m fairly confident none of them read my substack.

As quoted above, soldiers can earn as few as 60 points in any event as long as their total score is at least 350, for an average of 70 in each. This means if you miss five points on the deadlift, you have to make those five points up somewhere else. That said, the new 70 point standards, while higher than the ACFT, should be very achievable for a combat arms solider.

The Combat Standards

The required deadlifts are between 136-167% heavier for soldiers who only earned the previous 60 point minimums. These jumps depend on age and gender, but the new passing standard is 190 pounds for everyone but 17-21 year olds, who have to lift 200.

Percentage wise, HRPUs minimums saw the biggest increase, But the old standard of just 10 push-ups was possibly the weakest requirement in the whole ACFT. Since the old scale was gender neutral, both sexes need to do between 18 more reps for 17-21 year olds, down to just 12 more for those ages 47-51.

For combat MOS soldiers who were only passing the ACFT at 60 points, I think the Sprint Drag Carry is going to be the most challenging obstacle. The new combat standards are on average :26 seconds faster for men and 1:25 faster for women. Given how short the SDC is, this will mean those soldiers will need to complete the test in just 59-86% of their previous time.

The plank, like the HRPU, was also already gender neutral. It also got marginally harder. Combat soldiers need to now hold out for an additional :32 seconds on average.

The run standards got faster across both ages and genders. Soldiers 22-31 will need to run a 9:11 pace per mile, while those younger 17-21 year olds get an extra :07 seconds to pass. Combat soldiers 32 and over need to maintain a 9:15 pace per mile, which descends to a 10:10 pace as they age up to 52. These run standards are between 11-12% faster than the old ACFT minimums.

You can download a printable one-pager of all the above charts here.

The AFT Gen-pop Minimums.

The AFT score changes weren’t just for combat MOS soldiers. Non-combat MOSs saw their standards increase in three of the five events. There were no changes to the minimums for the sprint drag carry nor the plank.

Males under 32 saw their deadlift minimum increase by 10 pounds. Everyone else’s remained the same. Males aged 17-21 will need to do five more HRPUs, descending to just one more when they turn 47. Females will need to do a single additional HRPU from ages 17-36. As for the run, all soldiers under 57 will now face faster standards.

The biggest change is males ages 22-31, who need to run 2:15 seconds faster. For females the cut is smaller, only about a :30 seconds for those under 52. Regardless, soldiers who can manage 10 minute miles will have little trouble passing.

We’ve got six months

These new standards are not insurmountable. The AFT gen-pop minimums are very achievable and even the combat minimums aren’t impressive feats of strength for those who do these jobs every day.

What is key is we as leaders help our soldiers get there. Not everyone in your formation is ready today. But we’ve got till the end of the year to get them there. That means we as leaders need to step up. We need to not only explain why and the how of the change, but we need to lead our formations in a new style of fitness.

Fitness is not just an NCO job. In fact many of the army’s senior NCOs are the product of decades of training that only focused on ‘push-up, sit-up, run’. They may not know how to train for this new standard of readiness. The challenge is on all of us. We can do this. But we need all leaders, officers and NCOs to lead. It was leaders who failed us last time. Don’t be one of them this time.

Welcome to the new fitness standard: ready. If you’re already there, take the next six months to get someone else ready. If you’re not ready, go read, go learn, and go train. Get your formations ready. #AFTReady2025

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Peanut

Ronnie Coleman is a bodybuilder with a knack for great quotes, proof that being a strong ranger and a smart ranger is no more a binary choice than quality versus quantity. The WoD ‘Peanut’ is named after him.

Back in 2019, when a pending combat deployment to Iraq forced me to start programming my own workouts, this was one of the first workouts I did. It was the first day of May and already humid in North Carolina as I stood there in the outdoor prison gym glaring at the barbell in front of me. I didn’t want to do the workout, anymore than I wanted to do my own programming. I’d been spoiled for over a decade by going to great gyms with great coaches who, in addition to teaching me how to lift, train, and recover had also programmed my workouts for me.

Now it was my job. I’d seen Ronnie’s quote, ‘Ain’t nothin’ to it, but to do it’ emblazoned on the wall of more than one gym over the years, and it came back to me there in that moment. And so I started.

‘Peanut’ has been one of my regular WoDs ever since. It’s a good workout for anyone, but if you’re a combat arms soldier who’s sweating the new 70 point minimums, I can’t think of a better WoD to get you there. You’ll get plenty of deadlifts and the burpees will improve both your HRPU and planks. The whole set is a cardio gas, so it’ll improve your VO2Max while those bar facing burpee-over-the-bars are going to help your agility for the SDC. If you add this once a month into a decent workout regimen, I’m confident you’ll get to where you need to be by the 01 January 2026 suspense.

Peanut has a fair amount of deadlift reps, so focus on making each deadlift solid. Don’t rush into a back injury because your form went to shit. If you can’t deadlift 225 pounds yet, then just scale the weight back. Start out with what you can do and work your way up each month. The rounds are set as fractions of bodyweight — 1/2, 3/4, 1:1, and 5/4 — so use that as an aim point.

The reps come down as the weight goes up, and by the end you’ll have done way more than the three-rep 200 pounds you’re required. Three minutes is actually a fair amount of rest between each couplet — deadlift-burpees, deadlift-burpees, then rest. Focus on getting your heartrate and breathing under control in between. This will also help you train for the shorter transition between the AFT’s events.

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MOSs the Army is looking to fill:

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I’m going to examine the changes to each of the scoring brackets. Because this is a lot of data already, I’m only going to look at 60+ scores. For each of the events I’ll start with what changed for males, then females, and close with the changes to females in one of the 21 combat MOSs. Each chart will depict the raw score change. The numbers you see will be the change in pounds / reps / time you need to do just to keep the same points you had on your previous ACFT. The numbers are not the amount that needs to be lifted.

Because things get weird when you bounce between a deadlift that needs more weight, a sprint-drag-carry that requires less time, only to bounce back up to a plank that needs more time before coming back to run that needs you to go faster, we’re going to keep this simple.

Darker shades of green indicate a standard that got harder, while darker shades of red show where the standard gets easier.

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The Deadlift

Males: The biggest changes came to the 37-56 crowd in combat MOSs. Scores over 70 for this age group saw the biggest increases, with some needing to pick up as much as an additional 80 pounds just to keep their points. Under 70 points the standards went up, though less so. Down at the minimum the scores only got 10 pounds heavier, and only for the younger age groups. However, if you are a male in a combat MOS and you only barely passed the deadlift before, you might be in for a challenge. You now need to pick up an additional 50 pounds to keep your job.

I haven’t seen an updated Army Directive 2023-08 to account for the five event AFT, but assuming the same rules still apply, then soldiers like me who want to skip the tape test will need to get a 450 overall with no less than 80 in each event — you need to average 90+ points, but if you only get 79 points in an event, you’re gonna get taped.

If that remains the case, while 17-21 guys saw their max score get at least 10 pounds heavier, getting to 90 points actually got easier for 22-36 year old males. 37 and up though, you’re going to need to deadlift as much as 70 pounds more to avoid the tape measure.

Gen-Pop Females: The changes to the females deadlift scale is more distributed. To keep their scores over 80 points just about every female is going to need to deadlift an additional 10 pounds, with some bumping up another 20. However, it’ll get 10 pounds easier to deadlift for those with passing scores under 80 points. There was no change to the minimum level for female non-combat MOSs.

Some of the staggered change is because of how the stepped scoring shifted. Since points are based off 10 pound increments, there is no way for a 20 year old female to score just 98 points, because 210 gets you 99 points. Several of the steps shifted slightly up or down, hence the noise in the table above. Overall, since these scale changes are likely based off six years of ACFT data, this is an overall good sign. It indicates more and more female soldiers are improving their deadlifts over their careers.

Combat Females: The changes for female deadlifts in combat MOSs is much more stark. Everything got heavier. To max the deadlift most female soldiers will need to lift over 150% of their previous max. If a combat MOS female was maxing her deadlift at the ACFT’s 240 cap, she’s now going to have to pick up as much as an additional 110 pounds to keep 100 points.

To pass at 70 points female soldiers now need to lift 190 pounds for three reps — except 17-21 year olds who have to pick up 200, and those 52 and over who only need to pick up 140. Based off the RAND study released last year, the highest concentration of females tested we already lifting this much. So while the number of points they score will go down, it looks like most females in combat arms MOSs are already meeting this standard.

The Hand-Release Push Up

Males: The new male minimum standard is higher for most soldiers, tapering off from five additional reps for the young 17-21s down to just one single additional rep for those near 52. Given the minimum passing standards are all still under 16, this should be incredibly achievable.

Maxing the HRPUs didn’t change much at all, just a single additional rep for 17-21 and 42-46. Keeping the 70 point minimum doesn’t require much more effort either. Only once soldiers reach 42 will they see a similar rise in standards as we did with the deadlift. A combat arms MOS male that was struggling to exceed the minimum 60 points will need to more than double their previous score.

Gen-Pop Females: HRPUs was one of two events in the old ACFT with gender neutral standards, the other being the plank. As such the new AFT scale for gen-pop females doesn’t move a lot. To pass, females need to do a single additional rep until they read 37. The impacts to scores is instead going to be felt most by females over 37 who were scoring more than 70 points. Many of these soldiers will need to do as many as nine more reps to keep their old score.

Combat Females: One of the unusual things on the female HRPU table is the way it drops off immediately, unlike the male scale which actually increases up to the 27-31 age group before slowly dropping back down. Only once males reach 52 do they have to complete noticeably fewer HRPUs reps to max than a 17-21 year old soldier. Meanwhile, female scores decline from age 22. This divergence means the delta for female in combat arms MOSs will grow as they age, having to do more and more push-ups. However, this mostly is only at the max end of the spectrum.

While both males and females will need to do as many as 18 more reps to meet the 70 point standard, combat arms soldiers still don’t even have to complete 30 total HRPUs. Most combat arms MOS females were probably already exceeding the old ACFT standard of 10.

Sprint Drag Carry

Males and Gen-Pop Females: There isn’t any point in posting the default male or female charts. The only change was a 52-56 year old male needs to run :01 seconds faster to still get 79 points. I do not know why. The gen-pop female standards did not change at all.

Combat Females: For the average combat MOS female under 52, they’ll need to run :36 seconds faster to keep their points. A half a minute is a lot of time to cut when you consider the scores cover a range from maxing with just 1:29 for 17-21 year olds to 3:42 for the minimum 60 points in the 42-26 age bracket. That’ll require shaving between a 40% and 16% off their time.

For many soldiers the sprint-drag-carry is the most taxing event. So, while most pundits will likely spill a lot of ink about the deadlift changes, I think these will be some of the harder ones to move. In my opinion, soldiers looking to improve their scores should focus on two areas. First, you’re going to want a certain amount of mass. While too much can hurt you, a 90 pound drag requires a 130 pound soldier to generate significantly more force than a 180 pound soldier. Second, you’re going to need to train your body to blow through your VO2Max and tap into your anaerobic tolerance. training regimens that focus on these, like tabatas and failure based METCONs are great places to start.

Max Boredom For Time (The Plank)

No change here. The standards were already gender neutral, and the AFT made no changes. So hunker down, count the blades of grass, ask your grader about their family, and find something to distract yourself from how much you wish we’d just do leg tucks instead.

Two Mile Run

Males: There are a few changes to the male run scale. First off, 17-21 year old males get a bit of an easier start. Just about all their times over 70 points got easier, on average by :10 seconds. Once they get less than 70 though, the run times start picking up speed, with noticeable jumps for the minimum 60 point standard. The youngest age bracket needs to run 2:03 faster just to pass.

We see a bit of the opposite on the older age brackets. Those 47 and older are where we see the biggest time cuts to scores over 70 — around :10-:15 seconds, while the boomer bracket gets a generally easier cutoff in the 70 point range.

The bare minimum run times for all males under 57 got faster, with those under 32 having to run a full two-minutes faster than the ACFT. Those who read my last post will not be surprised to hear I am very much a fan.

Gen-Pop Females: Some of the faster female run standards I lauded last week are getting scaled back, with most of the scale shifting about :30 seconds slower. This still leaves most female max run times faster than the ones they had under the old APFT. There is one weird anomaly in the 99-93 point range for women ages 22-31, where they have to run an average of :13 faster. Not sure exactly what’s driving the change there.

Similar to the males, across all age brackets women under 52 have to run just under :30 seconds faster to meet the minimum standard.

Combat Females: The impact to combat MOSs is again, much higher. Females in combat MOSs will have to run close to two-minutes faster to keep their points. Even more significantly, for any females who were previously passing at the ACFT’s 60 point standard, they’ll need to shave, on average, 4:31 to meet the new two-mile combat standard.

That’s reads like a big jump, but it’s not clear how many females will be impacted. Unfortunately, I don’t have data on the current average run times for females soldiers in combat MOSs. Many are likely already exceeding the woefully slow 60 point standards. Given that the new passing standard is between 18:23 and 21:00, a runner can pass the test while cruising along at just over a 9:00 pace.

For an easy to grab yardstick, I looked at the results for the recent Canberra Day 5k here back in March. 2/5ths of the females who ran the local fun run were able to hold that pace. These females didn't do the other four AFT events first, but they also ran another 1.2 miles, so it's not an unfair comparison sample.

These new standards are not insurmountable.

The AFT gen-pop minimums are very achievable and even the combat minimums aren’t anything that’d win you a medal at a high school track and field competition. But they are still a change, one we as leaders need help our soldiers make. We need to explain what changed, why, and we need to seek out new knowledge on how to best prepare our formations.

I’m going to beat this drum every day if I have to: Fitness is not just an NCO job. Readiness is a leaders job. We can do this. But we need all leaders, officers and NCOs to lead.

Welcome to the new fitness standard: ready. Everyone has 6 months to get ready. So go get yourself ready. Get your formations ready too. #AFTReady2025

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Lots of soldiers want to know just how fit they should be. In my Where Data Meets Gains series, I firmly planted my flag on readiness as the best measure.

The real test comes when you haven’t rested up for a week or spent the whole day prior hydrating. It comes abruptly, when you aren’t ready and often when you didn’t want it to. It will come when you are tired and sore, and then it will turn around and test you again right after. And again.

The real test is simple. There’s just one question, and it is pass-fail: ‘Are you ready?’

Some people struggle to live with the ambiguity being ready demands. “Ready for what?’" It’s probably unsurprising I’m comfortable in that space, since the ability to handle uncertainty is just one of the key characteristics SFAS selects for. But being a Green Beret isn’t for everyone; there are other measures out there to use.

Mike Kloepper, the Brigade Tactical Officer at West Point, recently weighed in with his measure in a post on his substack.

A Cadet asked me a few days ago, “Sir, what’s a good run time in the actual Army?”

So, here’s the deal….

• The 2-mile run test isn’t about running 2 miles. It’s not about running at all.

• The 2-mile run test is actually about measuring VO2 Max.

• VO2 Max is your body's ability to perform endurance activities and is a predictor of athletic performance. It's also linked to overall health and longevity.

• Combat is an endurance activity that requires athletic performance.

So, the question isn’t, “What’s a good run time?”

The question should be, “In a contest of violence, suffering, and Will Power, how fit and tough do you want to be?” What’s good enough when it’s all on the line?

I think overall both Mike and my definitions largely converge. We also both think all soldiers should be fit, not just the combat arms ones. But we diverge on how to measure it.

I’m going to try to avoid raising issue with things Mike didn’t say, because he didn’t say a lot. He makes little to no mention of the other ACFT events, nor the different aspects of fitness they test. I don’t know Mike’s opinion on what a good deadlift score is. He never brings it up. But combat demands a minimum of raw power. History has plenty of anecdotes like Corporal Seyit’s when the ability to pick up and carry heavy things was the decisive difference between winning and losing.1

I also don’t know what Mike thinks about the way the sprint-drag-carry tests your anaerobic capacity and recovery. As a reminder, anaerobic is when you blow through your VO2Max and tax your body to its limit. The army’s study on the demands of combat, the one that led to the creation of the ACFT, found ‘intense sudden anaerobic activity’ and the ‘ability to rapidly reduce heart rate to either engage or make decisions’ were key. Indeed, the army found there was a persistent ‘requirement for continuous maximum effort followed by engagement and/or decision’. Mike didn’t give us his thoughts on anaerobic fitness nor a leader’s ability to regain the ability to think.

All we’ve got is his faith in VO2Max and the maximum run times on the two-mile run test as his metric.

Where Mike and I Diverge

Mike starts off with the claim that ‘We are getting slower’ and includes a snapshot of historical maximum test standards (100 points).

But that claim is not entirely true. Not everyone’s maximum scores have gotten slower. Here’s what the full data really says.

Now there’s a lot of data in this chart, but I’m going to come back to it. First, take a closer look at the lower left portion of the chart:

The men’s maximum scores have slowed down in all but two age brackets (42-46 & 62+), by about :14 seconds on average. But the women’s maximum scores have gotten faster for every age bracket, from as little as :07 seconds (17-21) to as much as 2:42 (62+). I think there’s good reasons for this change, but we owe credit where credit is due: women are having to run faster to max the two-mile run in the ACFT than they did in the old test.

Mike next highlights that ‘we’re getting bigger’.

While I don’t dispute America’s declining fitness, I do take issue with the data Mike’s leveraging. He didn’t include a link to the chart, but a google image search turned up this study In the New England Journal of Medicine. The infographic is based off BMI data, which as I’ve addressed elsewhere, is a lazy and inaccurate way to calculate fitness.

Mike concludes, ‘We are slowly moving the goal posts of excellence’. He’s not entirely wrong. We did after all make it a little easier to max the run for men and objectively harder for women. But the principal reason the max scores changed isn’t because we got obese, it’s because the test got harder. Under the old three-event APFT, soldiers were taxed less. Neither the push-ups nor the sit-ups came close to a soldiers VO2Max, coming no where near anaerobic heart rates. But even more importantly, soldiers were given noticeably more rest:

‘Soldiers are allowed a minimum of 10 minutes and a maximum of 20 minutes rest between events.’ - FM 7-22

Meanwhile rest in the ACFT is restricted to just a handful of minutes between the first several events. While soldiers do get a longer rest before the final two-mile run, the old minimum is now the maximum reprieve.

‘After the Plank event, there is a programmed rest 10 minutes before starting the 2-mile Run’ - ATP 7-22.1

And more importantly, this comes on the heels of the sprint-drag-carry, which pushes most soldiers through their VO2Max and into an anaerobic heart rate. The plank buys some time for recovery, but there’s typically still lactic acid coursing through your veins when you start that run. That’s what those additional :14 seconds are based on.

Why VO2Max Isn’t The Only Measurement

VO2Max is one good measurement to add to your overall self-assessment. But it’s not the only one. This is part of why our fitness test has five events — more on that change later. But you don’t even have to run two miles to test your VO2Max. Writing back in 2018, Zach Griffiths highlighted how a shuttle run can provide an accurate assessment:

With that in mind, a more field-expedient method of predicting VO2 max and aerobic capacity would be the use of the twenty-meter multistage shuttle run test, otherwise known as the “beep test.” Multiple studies dating back to 1989 have confirmed the efficacy of using the twenty-meter shuttle run as a predictor of VO2 max and aerobic capacity.2

Any unit deployed anywhere can find a flat 20m stretch somewhere.

But I argue VO2Max isn’t enough of an assessment on its own. The army agrees. We used the two-mile run for decades as a yardstick and it was found wanting.

Let’s look at an example. Cyclist Oskar Svendsen is regarded as the world record holder for VO2Max with his 96.7 milliliter-per-kilogram-per-minute set back in 2012. That is a truly impressive feat of athletic ability. But at 6’4” and just 167.5 pounds, his VO2Max begs the question: What would he do with 18 to 45 kilos of kit on him? Oskar is dangerously close to falling below the minimum weight to even serve in the army for his height. He’s easily 30 pounds under the mass we’d expect a soldier of his height to have.

Think of the world champion marathoners. They have certainly got incredible VO2Maxes which enables them to cruise through each kilometer at a sub 3:00 pace. They can finish a two-mile in just over nine minutes, obliterating even the pre-1998 max standard. But then look at their calves. Look at their thighs. Look at their shoulders. They would crumble under kit.

This is part of why RAND’s study found the deadlift was a strong predictor of not just ACFT success, but also passing other combat focused skills.

Mike only gives us his thoughts on the two-mile and VO2Max. He doesn’t tell soldiers how to assess combat related tasks. He doesn’t ask, ‘How fast should my sprint-drag-carry be? What about if I fall down (twice) and have to chase down the kettlebells I yardsaled and keep going? What’s an acceptable time then? What’s a good way to test my ability to get hurt, to get thrown for a loop, to get hit and have to keep going?'

VO2Max doesn’t answer those questions.

And while Mike doesn’t say running is the way to train fitness, his post can leave soldiers with that impression. But running isn’t always the best use of your training time and can lead to repetitive use injuries. There are faster ways to improve your VO2Max, ones that will also improve your anaerobic capacity. High Intensity weight training will not only improve your overall strength and help protect against injuries, it can also improve your run time.

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Why Max Scores Aren’t The Measurement Either

Max scores encourage a plateau mindset. This is not unique to fitness and was one of the challenges the USMC focused on with their new JMAP marksmanship program.3 Max scores actually discourage real achievement, because they disincentive pushing past them. Max scores are why you see soldiers stop and get up as soon as they hit them, rather than finding out what they can really do.

They also breed a ‘max score’ identity that can both lower standards and disincentivize growth. The change in 1998 from a 11:54 to a 13:00 maximum score two-mile run time was largely driven by the desire to have more 300 APFT ‘leaders’ across the army. That stubborn ‘I’m a 300 soldier’ attitude is a large part of why it’s 2025 and we still don’t have an ACFT ready army.

Some of the best assessments I’ve done involve minimum standards, but no maximum. These ensure everyone can perform at the required ability to do their job, while also encouraging soldiers to pursue greatness where they can. One example is the UBRR, where you can earn 100 points for achieving the minimum in each of the nine events and then receive supplemental points for exceeding the standard.4 A passing score is 900 points, but soldiers are encouraged to exceed that standard and can even make up for failing an event by excelling in others. I’ve served with some incredible soldiers whose UBRR score would be a phenomenal SAT score.

Thanks to Rob Vaccarelli and the guys in C/1-1, I’ve also adopted an even more challenging version of the UBRR where the events start every three minutes. In addition to dramatically reducing rest, it puts you into a tough position of deciding whether those additional reps are worth the fleeting break you need before you start the next challenge. It engages your decision making while under duress and forces you to be judicious in where you expend your energy over a sustained burn.

The Minimum Run Times Are Our Real Problem

While Mike and I diverge on VO2Max and his focus on max scores, we are in violent agreement on the other end of the ACFT scale.

I would worry deeply about a young officer who is having trouble generating the minimum time of 22 minutes

Let’s go back to that chart and take a look at the right side this time.

See that dashed line with gold dots on it? That’s the minimum ‘gold’ standard from the 2019 version of the ACFT — back when we had leg tucks.5 Currently, the minimum scores for all ages and genders is even slower than the 2019 minimum standard.

I care way more about the minimum standards than I do the maximum ones. This is because the real answer to that cadet’s question isn’t what his run time should be, it’s what his team’s run time is.

Combat is not a solo sport. Your best run time won’t help you much in combat, but your team’s weakest run time could get you all killed. One thing you learn in ground fighting is the guy whose buddy shows up first is the winner.

The last ruck march I did in the infantry before I left for SFAS still sticks with me. I’d just finished a week of training in the field and coincidentally my time as an XO of an infantry RSTA company.6 As we set off on a 12 mile ruck back to the headquarters it became clear pretty quickly that not everyone in the company was going to make it. At the first water break, the company commander berated the formation for how slow they were moving and then took off again with just one other platoon leader in his wake.

The remaining platoon leader — our company only had two scout-sniper platoons — took stock of the formation and set out at a new pace, with the first sergeant in trail. We lost a couple more, and that was ok. It was training and people have to be allowed to fail. But the junior lieutenant understood how to strike the balance between keeping enough of his formation to be able to execute his combat mission and the need to send a clear signal that the company needed to step up its overall fitness.

When we trudged into the HQ, we were easily an hour behind the commander and the other lieutenant. They were quick to gloat. I just rolled my eyes and commended the young LT. ‘I can’t think of a recce mission I can complete with just a captain and a lieutenant. Nice work.’

I have a lot of concerns about our ACFT minimums. It’s perfectly normal these days to see someone walking on the run, confident they can still pass the standard. I don’t think every soldier needs to be a gazelle that can run a 13:30. But I do think they need to be capable of jogging two miles without walking.

Meet the AFT (Standards TBD)

Which is why I’m stoked to see the army has another prime opportunity to get this right. It looks like the army listened to the RAND study, because the first thing they did was get rid of the overhead yeet. They’ve also announced a list of 21 MOSs that will have new gender-neutral standards.

Back in January I did a deeper dive on the higher standards the RAND study recommended, but we’ll have to wait to see which ones the army releases in the coming months. I’ll admit, I don’t know what ‘age normed’ means, but I’m not excited by it. If the rigors of combat don’t discriminate on gender, then they damn well don’t take age into account either.

The AFT represents a great chance to eliminate max scores and instead reexamine where we put the ‘black’ and ‘silver’ cut off lines. Regular Downrange Data readers know me well enough to know I’ll be following up with another post as soon as the new standards are published.

Until then, just because the stupid yeet is gone, doesn’t mean you don’t need explosive power. Best get back to those barbells.

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