Secretary of Defense Rock

Live look if the apolitical military professional:

Genuinely funny the amount of hours and who knows how many scholars have spent trying to tell the story of Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan/etc and POTUS just goes up and says “actually it’s because of political correctness” and whole bunch of people believe him

I’m so tired dawg

sometimes you do, in fact, need a Darby Force at Salerno or 2nd Rangers to scale Pointe du Hoc but sometimes they get Cisterna'd

Second Breakfast: Parades, U.S. Grant, JCIDS, Warbots Spotify video

I forget what episode it was (I think this one) but the second breakfast pod guys had a very nice conversation about this problem so if you haven’t go listen already! @tonystark.bsky.social @uticaeric.bsky.social

And the cult of SOF is a real problem given that, if we've seen one thing in Ukraine, it is that in a near-peer conflict, highly-trained, ultra-elite infantry cost a lot to form and field but get shredded by firepower at exactly the same rate, if not faster than, regular infantry.

And this all starts right out of the academies or ROTC, are the top of the class going into arty or armor or logistics, no they’re all going to the 173rd airborne or ranger school, so you can see how the army has become so light infantry/SOF centric

I had a friend who just left the Army, a West Pointer who commissioned as an arty officer. His reasoning was basically: he realized he probably wouldn’t be going anywhere with his current creds, so why waste the time staying in?

It’s pretty emblematic of today’s US Army, if you didn’t go to jump school, Ranger school, or some kind of SOF course, people question whether you were really “in” the Army at all, thus a whole bunch of officers who could be helpful self select out

Dysfunctional successful teams always fascinate me

Welp

They invade/blockade Taiwan by 2027 (the supposed date the PLA will be ready by)

I think this is becoming more likely ngl

The Rise and the Fall of the GOP China Hawks Is This Where They Were Always Going to End Up?

🤷🏻‍♂️

Live look of the GOP China hawks:

I’m gonna say it again, we’re gonna manifest 2027 out of sheer ego.

Let’s go hahahaha

I don’t really care but you could just say “one observer” or “one writer” lol I do it a bunch in my own articles

Ya, like all of the criticisms are attributed to me and all the guys on second breakfast and uh, ya I think we have insights but that might be flimsy

A correction is really necessary.

I’ll make my own fair-minded criticisms, I can’t wear them like someone else’s cologne.

I think Anduril has some iron-clad fundamental assumptions about attritable systems in contemporary war and I’ve hit that on the podcast, bizarre to see this anti-take unfold.

The War Over Defense Tech | Susannah Glickman Last October, on a Martin Luther–inspired website called www.18theses.com, a software executive named Shyam Sankar published a four-thousand-word polemic

It’s a pretty good article tbh but I just don’t get how that happens

I still cannot get over the fact that nearly an entire paragraph of my writing quoted with a link in this New York Review piece only to have it attributed to someone completely different lol (no offense to @uticaeric.bsky.social , who is quoted throughout)

Lmfao, they cited my boy @sodrock.bsky.social in this but attributed it to Eric.

Subscribe to History Does You Mostly Musings on History but also Civil-Military Relations, Foreign Policy, and the Indo-Pacific. Click to read History Does You, by Secretary of Defense Rock, a Substack publication with thousands o...

Since I’m being cited now

The author cited an entire paragraph of mine so I really don’t understand why they turn around and attribute it to Eric? (No offense @uticaeric.bsky.social)

I wouldn’t want to cite “secretary of defense rock” either lol

Actually I want them to unlink now

I cannot believe they actually linked that hahaha

LMFAO