Milstack Saturday (12 April 2025)
John Schmitt, an old friend of the days of the Quantico Renaissance, has just begun to post his tactical decision games on Substack. So, if you like the decision-forcing exercises that appear in the pages of The Tactical Notebook, you will love ShadowBox Decision Games: Warfighters. (In the year of wonders of 1989, Major Schmitt both wrote the classic précis of maneuver warfare FMFM 1: Warfighting and championed the revival of tactical decision games in the US Marine Corps.)
Mathew Palmer has just begun a series that attempts to answer the question: What is the UK Actually Good At? So, if you dwell in the intersection of Jane’s Defense Weekly and the works of P.G. Wodehouse, you will find much of interest in the pages of Cracking Defense.
I read Rare Words Well Done while eating a steak. Thanks to that happy coincidence, I embraced the essence of Trent Lythgow’s message: military writing must be clear, direct, and accessible, but can also provide the reader with a bit of fun.
While we are on the subject of enjoyable communications, Tariffs as Narrative Weapons combines lively cartoons with fresh, well-wrought ideas to rescue an important subject from the cold, dead hands of the grim science.
‘Please, Sir, may I have more?’
