Milstack Saturday (10 May 2025)
The best of what I read in the past week
Strategy
Readers looking for a short course in strategy may want to engage a trio of articles that I found in Substack in the course of the past fortnight.
Start with Geopolitical Books for Beginners, which will introduce you to the best of what, faute de mieux, I will call ‘linear strategic thinking’.
Next, give your full attention to Strategy as an Ecosystem, thereby immersing yourself in a work that challenges the framework provided by the first piece.
Once the ideas gleaned from the first two articles have boxed a few rounds in the ring of your brain-housing group, spend some time with The Age of the Forever Wars.
Operations
Understanding Iran’s Geography begins a promising series on a hypothetical invasion of the Artist Formerly Known as Persia by taking a Texas-sized look at the physical properties of a place more than two-and-a-half times as big as, you guessed it, Texas.
Organization
If you like to ponder the internal workings of armies, you will find much grist for your mill in The Motherland Calls: The Russian All-Volunteer Force and Reforming the Pentagon. (The latter piece consists largely of a podcast interview with Gary Anderson, for whom I worked during the 1990s.)
Leadership
A champion of the maneuver warfare movement within the US Marine Corps, Michael Duncan Wyly describes the experience of Taking Command in Combat.
The Soul at War
If you like Ernst Jünger, you will love The Cure for Boredom is a Stalk.
