by Joey Middleton | Feb 26, 2026 | SOF and Strategic Competition
by Daniel Pullan, by Joshua Young Executive Summary In an era of strategic competition, America’s adversaries are engaged in persistent operations against US interests in a spectrum of low-intensity conflict frequently referred to as the “gray zone”. The legal and...
by Joey Middleton | Feb 23, 2026 | SOF and Strategic Competition
By Chad Machiela, by Seth Gray Department of Defense Instruction 3000.07 defines Irregular Warfare with ambiguous criteria, including indirect approaches and asymmetric activities, which are also characteristic of conventional warfare. This lack of differentiating...
by Joey Middleton | Feb 20, 2026 | SOF and Strategic Competition
By Sean Ryan, by Adib Farhadi Introduction Why Afghanistan matters for the U.S. military today is no longer a question of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, or nation-building. Instead, Afghanistan has reemerged as a permissive or semi-permissive arena for...
by Joey Middleton | Feb 17, 2026 | SOF and Strategic Competition
Timothy Jones, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, United States John Willingham, U.S. Government, Washington, D.C., United States Kenneth Walls Jr., U.S. Navy, Virginia Beach, Virginia, United States In an era of renewed strategic rivalry, the maritime...
by Joey Middleton | Feb 16, 2026 | SOF and Strategic Competition
by Matt Armstrong This article is a re-publish of a critique of Frank Hoffman’s Assessing “Cognitive Warfare” article that ran on Small Wars Journal on November 11, 2025. The critique ran on Matt Armstrong’s substack, Arming for the War We’re In on November 17, 2025....
by Joey Middleton | Feb 9, 2026 | SOF and Strategic Competition, Uncategorized
By Jahara Matisek, Robert Schafer In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s Cat is often mischaracterized as a simple problem of observation. In reality, the thought experiment illustrates something more unsettling: a system can exist in multiple states simultaneously, and...
