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...
by Joey Middleton | Jan 26, 2026 | SOF and Strategic Competition
What the plan is trying to do in one sentence It reorients diplomacy around a short list of national priorities and uses visas, bilateral deals, assistance, sanctions, standards setting, and commercial diplomacy as leverage to shape partner behavior and global systems...
by Joey Middleton | Jan 26, 2026 | SOF and Strategic Competition
Strategy is not abstract for the Special Operations community. It becomes deployment tempo, operational risk, and time away from home. And while the National Defense Strategy rarely needs to name Special Operations Forces directly, it assigns missions and priorities...
