America has struggled to achieve decisive strategic outcomes against determined adversaries despite overwhelming battlefield superiority. The following three forces largely explain why.

First, politics increasingly dictates strategy, including when and—critically—how we fight. Second, institutional inertia prevents our military and defense industrial base from adapting to the speed of modern warfare. Third, declining patriotism makes it increasingly difficult to persuade Americans that national sacrifice is sometimes necessary, resulting in our military failing to achieve objectives in a politically timely manner.

These three problems build on one another, with politics the central obstacle. Without political unity, neither military reform nor industrial mobilization can occur.

Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, coupled with China's control over critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, and its long-term ambition to dominate global trade and finance, are forcing the United States to reassess how to preserve the economic and military strength that underpins our prosperity. It's not that our leaders fail to recognize these challenges; the problem is that they are unwilling to level with the American people.

Mobilization Begins With Political Unity

Every successful American mobilization has begun with a common understanding that the nation faced a serious threat. During World War II, the Korean War, the Reagan military buildup,

My first encounter with trans was in the early 1950s, when Christine Jorgensen became the first widely known person to undergo "sex reassignment" surgery.  I remember some of my peers mocking Christine by threatening to swap the feminine lips and masculine mustache between Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head.  After some laughter, eye-rolling, and snide smiles, seven-year-olds settled the issue: It was ridiculous — we called it crazy — to believe that Mr. Potato Head could become Mrs. Potato Head any more than a man could become a woman.

The trans issue reemerged with the Reimer twins, Bruce and Brian.  In the 1960s, during what was supposed to be a routine circumcision, Bruce's penis was destroyed.  Dr. John Money at Johns Hopkins University saw an opportunity to demonstrate that sex roles are a blank slate at birth and are shaped by culture, not genetics.  He convinced Bruce's parents that with surgery, hormones, and therapy, Bruce could be successfully transitioned to female.  Bruce was castrated, given hormones, renamed Brenda, and not told that he had once been Bruce.  From the beginning, "Brenda" didn't like acting like a girl.  He tore off his dresses and played with his twin brother's toys more than his own.  After applying makeup, Brenda said he looked

In revealing the commonalities of the Reds and the Greens in the Red-Green Axis, we have elucidated their shared goals of violence, wealth redistribution, inequality before the law, a binary world, and monopoly rule by the elites. Here we explore their intent to reshape the totality of society.

Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both claim more than the right to regulate what is currently unsettled. Each claims the standing authority to redraw, at will, the line between what the system controls and what it leaves alone. A domain currently left to private choice is never permanently protected from the system; it is simply not yet a priority.

The distinction between public and private in both systems is not a fixed boundary the directing authority respects. It is a boundary the directing authority draws and can erase.

Classical Islamic jurisprudence sorts every human act into one of five categories: obligatory, recommended, neutral, disliked, or forbidden. Nothing is unclassifiable; even silence in the texts produces a ruling—neutral—rather than an absence of one. That alone establishes comprehensive jurisdiction.

The more consequential mechanism is sadd al-dhara'i' or "blocking the means": a jurist may rule an otherwise

Article III of the Constitution allows Congress to establish courts below the Supreme Court, which includes federal District and Circuit Courts. If Congress can establish them, it can abolish them. In 1801, in the waning days of John Adams' presidency, Congress did just that and abolished the district and circuit courts of the District of Columbia.

These two courts display widespread intransigent partisanship and demonstrably poor scholarship, exemplified by this week's ruling on the new White House construction. Given the difficulty of removing so many bad judges in these two courts by impeaching them, it's time to repeat John Adams' move: Abolish these courts. Cases that normally would be heard in them should be assigned to courts elsewhere.

The case which most showcases the lunacy of the D.C. courts is National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States v. National Park Service, et al. As is often the case in poorly reasoned opinions, the author substitutes words for reason.

As you may know, the old East Wing of the White House which, among other things, contained underground security facilities (bunkers, bomb-shelters, and military and medical infrastructure), presidential offices and some minimal public meeting spaces, was torn down and construction

I have a dream that American farmers, drillers, miners, industrialists, and manufacturers produce everything that American consumers need.  I have a dream that anything worth building is built in America, that any job worth doing is done in America, and that anything worth buying can be found and shipped within the United States.  

Why did we allow ourselves to be convinced that Americans should make only a few select things and buy everything else from foreign markets?  Why did we allow politicians and Wall Street investors to convince us that "free trade" requires slave labor from faraway lands?  Why did we spend a century ensuring safer work environments and more dependable wages for our skilled tradesmen only to export those jobs to adversarial nations that care nothing about worker safety or providing above-subsistence standards of living?  Why did we fight a Cold War in defense of freedom only to subsidize Chinese communism?  Why do we regulate ourselves to death in the name of "fighting global warming," while China and India inflict the worst environmental damage on the planet?

Prove these statements wrong: There is no worker on the planet more capable than an American.  There is no nation of people more innovative than the United States.  There is

When a judge sentences a violent criminal to twenty years in prison, citizens believe that society will be protected from that individual for the next two decades. In reality, however, it is far more likely that the perpetrator will only be detained for about eight years. That routine discrepancy can be called the sentencing illusion.

Politicians and prosecutors frequently stand before cameras to announce lengthy prison terms in order to encourage citizens to conclude that justice has been served and dangerous criminals have been removed from society for the duration of their declared sentence.

The reason for this delusion is self-serving for all involved. The pronouncement caters to political perceptions. The reality is a product of incentives.

Prosecutors seek to be portrayed as relentless advocates for justice, and judges want to appear as impartial guardians of public policy. Yet each operates under a set of incentives that point in a different direction. As a result, crime victims, police officers, and ordinary citizens are often shocked and frustrated to find that reoffenders are back to their predatory ways after only serving a fraction of their stated sentence.

To understand why this deception has become normal operating procedure for our justice system, we must understand

Some politically charged words become part of our common vocabulary almost overnight.  "Globalism" is a timely example.  Ten or fifteen years ago, calling someone a "globalist" didn't have much effect.  Today, it is well understood as a pejorative that highlights someone's allegiance to international institutions over those created within a nation state.

Although the term has been used in various academic circles for more than a century, it didn't become part of our common political parlance until anti-Establishment conservatives in the United States and Europe found it a useful taxonomic description of their ideological opponents.  In hindsight, it is surprising how long the word "globalism" remained dormant and hidden away in the context of political speech and debate.  

During the Cold War, however, the world was divided between the Soviet Union and the United States, between communism and freedom, between closed economies and open markets.  To the extent that nationalism and globalism were distinguished from each other, academics and political leaders did so under the umbrella of the Cold War contest between East and West to gobble up as many nation states as possible.  Both sides embraced a "domino theory" of geopolitics in which partisans fought for global domination, one nation at a time.

There was, however, an

The grocery store may be the least forgiving classroom in which to teach political economy. The shelves do not care about ideology. The checkout scanner does not respond to applause lines. A gallon of milk does not know whether it was purchased in a capitalist marketplace or a municipal experiment in economic justice. It only knows what it cost to produce, transport, refrigerate, stock, and sell.

That is the inconvenient thing about economics. The numbers have no political affiliation. They simply arrive at the register.

That reality is the great problem for economic promises. They sound wonderful from a podium. They become considerably more complicated somewhere between the warehouse and the shopping cart.

More than a century ago, Americans laughed at a song built around an apparently contradictory declaration: "Yes, we have no bananas." The joke worked because the contradiction was obvious. In modern politics, the same joke has returned wearing a suit and carrying a spreadsheet.

Which brings us to one of the more fascinating promises emerging from the modern urban left: the government grocery store. The concept has obvious emotional appeal. Groceries are more expensive than they were in 2019. Families are frustrated. Everyone would like to see lower prices at

Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both concentrate the authority to define correct doctrine, law, and policy in a closed directing elite. Ordinary members, let alone outsiders, lack standing to challenge the core claims. The result is an interpretive monopoly converting a comprehensive worldview into enforceable political control. This is not a secondary feature; it is a practical mechanism that secures ideological unity and suppresses competing claims to legitimacy.

In 833, the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun ordered his judges and scholars to affirm that the Quran was created rather than eternal. The position came from the Mu'tazila, a rationalist theological school the caliph favored, which held that an eternal, uncreated Quran would stand as a second eternal being alongside God, violating His absolute oneness; traditionalists held instead that the Quran was God's own uncreated, inseparable speech. Those who refused faced dismissal, imprisonment, or the lash; al-Ma'mun's successor, the caliph al-Mu'tasim, had the traditionalist jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal flogged for holding out.

The inquisition (the Mihna) ran for fifteen years before al-Mu'tasim's own son, the caliph al-Mutawakkil, ended it in 848 and restored the doctrine ibn Hanbal had defended. The lesson: a caliph could jail a scholar; he could not manufacture consensus. That

Abbie Hoffman was a colorful radical who led a group called the Yippies (derived from the name Youth International Party, founded in 1967) along with Jerry Rubin, who eventually left the radical movement of Yippie-dom to become a stockbroker. Abbie wrote a best-selling book titled Revolution for the Hell of It and was known for combining mockery and humor with his revolutionary fervor. On one occasion, he went to the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and threw dollar bills from the visitors' balcony towards the floor of the Exchange. It was Abbie's way of mocking the money-focus of the NYSE and of American society.

Hoffman was a graduate of Brandeis University, where as an undergraduate, he took courses taught by a professorial savant by the name of Prof. Herbert Marcuse. Prof. Marcuse was one of a group of academics known as the Frankfurt School, who had migrated to the USA from Germany to escape the threat of Nazi persecution for their Marxist views. The Nazis also wanted strict government control of the economy, but private ownership of property was still allowed (however, ownership without having the final say over the use or disposal of that property or its

The political left has developed a remarkably simple response to almost every proposed election safeguard: Call it voter suppression.

Require identification at the polls? Voter suppression. Verify citizenship during registration? Voter suppression. Correct inaccurate registration records? A voter "purge." Adjust early-voting schedules? An assault on minority voters.

Different policies addressing different aspects of election administration are bundled together as parts of a national conspiracy to prevent minorities and Democrats from voting. Motive is assumed, discriminatory effect is declared, and accusation substitutes for evidence.

Citizenship is the foundation of our electoral system. Only American citizens may vote in federal elections. Investigators have identified serious anomalies in registration records nationwide. When government refuses reasonable verification or correction of demonstrably ineligible records, it leaves the basic qualification for voting inadequately enforced.

That principle is at the center of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, commonly called the SAVE America Act. The House-passed legislation would require documentary proof of citizenship when registering for federal elections and photo identification when voting.

Opponents often portray the bill as requiring every prospective voter to possess a passport. That is not what it says.

Acceptable documentation includes identification indicating citizenship; a valid U.S. passport; certain military records; photo identification showing a U.S.

Even with the unpredictability of evil actors in matters of war, a normalcy bias that developed after World War II has enveloped the minds of many policymakers involved with U.S. war-fighting strategy. American approaches to war for the last 70 years have been characterized by a normalcy bias that war conduct should be guided by the goal of reaching negotiated compromise outcomes rather than achieving victory and total defeat of the enemy.

Douglas MacArthur was relieved of duty as Commanding General of the U.S. Army Forces-Far East on April 11, 1951, almost a year into the Korean War. A week later, he gave his farewell address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, a speech that was coined as the "No Substitute for Victory in War" speech. MacArthur's full quote on the essential importance of victory in that speech was, "War's very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war, there is no substitute for victory."

The current war with Iran that started on February 28, 2026, has not been conducted by the MacArthur maxim. Rather, similar to previous conflicts, it has been carried out through cycles of intense strikes -- ceasefires and lengthy "peace" negotiations -- truce breakdown