Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast

Hybrid warfare is a can of worms, a fascinating conjoining of kinetic and non-kinetic means of achieving victory or stale between warring nations.

We continue our conversation.

References:

The Arcata Summit 13-14 November 2026

War Without a Center: Iran’s Mosaic Defense

Richard J. Samuels Special Duty: A History of the Japanese Intelligence Community

John Llewelyn The Imperial Japanese Army’s Tokumu Kikan – Special Service Organisations: Connections Between Wartime and Peacetime Intelligence Activities

Simon Hall BLINDED BY THE RISING SUN JAPANESE MILITARY INTELLIGENCE FROM THE FIRST SINO-JAPANESE WAR TO THE END OF WORLD WAR I

Interrogation of IJF CDR Miyazaki

Report to Congress on Russian Hybrid Warfare in Europe 11 August 2026

The Future of Hybrid Warfare

Hybrid Warfare: How to Escape the Conceptual Gray-Zone

The Evolution of Hybrid Warfare: Implications for Strategy and the Military Profession

Richard Feynman Cargo Cult speech at CalTech 1974

RAND wish-casting on drones in 2015.

Slaughterbots (2017)

Slaughterbots: if human: kill() (2021)

How are Drones Changing Modern Warfare?

H. John Poole The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO’s Contribution to Warfare

Christian Brose The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America

Email at [email protected]

Hybrid warfare Is a can of worms, a fascinating conjoining of kinetic and non-kinetic means of achieving victory or stale between warring nations.

This second episode examines an historical example of what I think is the closest modern hybrid warfare modality in the Japanese Empire in the 1930s leading to WWII; the.Imperial Japanese Army’s Tokumu Kikan – Special Service Organizations that laid the groundwork for this phenomenon in the modern west.

References:

Richard J. Samuels Special Duty: A History of the Japanese Intelligence Community

John Llewelyn The Imperial Japanese Army’s Tokumu Kikan – Special Service Organisations: Connections Between Wartime and Peacetime Intelligence Activities

Report to Congress on Russian Hybrid Warfare in Europe 11 August 2026

The Future of Hybrid Warfare

Hybrid Warfare: How to Escape the Conceptual Gray-Zone

The Evolution of Hybrid Warfare: Implications for Strategy and the Military Profession

Richard Feynman Cargo Cult speech at CalTech 1974

RAND wish-casting on drones in 2015.

Slaughterbots (2017)

Slaughterbots: if human: kill() (2021)

How are Drones Changing Modern Warfare?

Sun Tzu The Art of War

Carl von Clausewitz On War

Miyamoto Musashi A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

H. John Poole The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO’s Contribution to Warfare

Christian Brose The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America

My Substack

Email at [email protected]

Hybrid warfare Is a can of worms, a fascinating conjoining of kinetic and non-kinetic means of achieving victory or stale between warring nations. This first episode tries to lay the ground work of what it is and in the next two episodes we will examine an historical and a contemporary example of hybrid warfare in meat-space.

References:

Report to Congress on Russian Hybrid Warfare in Europe 11 August 2026

The Future of Hybrid Warfare

Hybrid Warfare: How to Escape the Conceptual Gray-Zone

The Evolution of Hybrid Warfare: Implications for Strategy and the Military Profession

Richard Feynman Cargo Cult speech at CalTech 1974

RAND wish-casting on drones in 2015.

Slaughterbots (2017)

Slaughterbots: if human: kill() (2021)

How are Drones Changing Modern Warfare?

Sun Tzu The Art of War

Carl von Clausewitz On War

Miyamoto Musashi A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

H. John Poole The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO’s Contribution to Warfare

Christian Brose The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America

My Substack

Email at [email protected]

I discuss the possibilities of America relinquishing its global ambition to reduce its footprint to a regional hegemon in the Western hemisphere. The new technologies of AI, UAVs and hypersonics rather easily challenge the spending paradigms and mission architecture of the American armed forces.

There are no near-peer competitors, every nation on Earth is now a peer to modern western war machines.

America boasts a magnificent 20th century war machine is not fit for purpose for 21st century peer warfare.

The crossroads is chock-full of landmines.

References:

Christian Brose The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America

Martin van Creveld

The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz

Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945

Colin Gray

Strategy and History: Essays on Theory and Practice

Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy

William Lind Maneuver Warfare Handbook

John Boyd Patterns of Conflict

Michael Weiner Legacy of Ashes: History of the CIA

John Prado The Ghosts of Langley: Into the CIA's Heart of DarknessSun Tzu The Art of War

Carl von Clausewitz On War

Miyamoto Musashi A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

H. John Poole The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO’s Contribution to Warfare

My Substack

Email at [email protected]

The US Navy is lost at sea and in the thrall of exquisite platform that be the maritime tombs of tens of thousands of sailors in the coming wars of the 21st century.

The acquisition system is broken beyond repair, burn it down.

The aircraft carrier has been a signature component of US naval power and prestige for more than a century. The utility has continued to diminish since the end of WWII. The tremendous disadvantage of putting so much manpower and treasure into these single use leviathan systems in the modern world of distributed missile and PGM systems, emerging near-peer & peer adversaries and concentration of power in vulnerable systems is a recipe for future disaster.

The US Navy surface fleet is in tatters and shattered by readiness, maintenance and armament issues that are critical indicators of a navy totally unprepared.

More on the carrier dilemma in Chasing Ghosts Episode #034, WarNotes #10 and Dispatch #006.

Note: This post is published a little early due to my attendance at the Military Operations Research Society Annual Symposium in CO this week.

References:

The Documents Exist: Nobody Assigned Them As Mandatory Reading.

What Would Rickover Do?

Jeff Vandenengel National Policy and the Panoceanic Navy

James D, Hornfischer Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War 1945-1960

Gregory Vistica Fall from Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy

Michael Junge Crimes of Command: in the United States Navy, 1945-2015

Gerry Doyle Carrier Killer: China's Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles and Theater of Operations in the early 21st Century

David Lee Russell Early U.S. Navy Carrier Raids, February-April 1942: Five Operations That Tested a New Dimension of American Air Power

Jeff Vandenengel Questioning the Carrier: Opportunities in Fleet Design for the U.S. Navy

Jeff Vandenengel interview on Midrats with CDR Salamander

Ivan Gogin Fighting ships of the PEOPLE LIBERATION ARMY NAVY 1949 - 2023

Jerry Hendrix Retreat From Range: The Rise and Fall of Carrier Aviation

My Substack

Write me at [email protected]

I discuss the darker side of celebrating war and the moral injury of wars of choice. Memorial Day is a day of remembrance and an existential wake.

This day is about the ashes of victory and blood lakes of defeat. I show how the American way of war is far more brutal and murderous than the usual suspects let on..

***This episode is not for the squeamish or faint of heart.***

U.S. WAR CRIMES IN THE PHILIPPINES

James M. Scott Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila

Howard Jones My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness

Karl Marlantes What It Is Like to Go to War

Bill Russel Edmonds God is Not Here: A Soldier's Struggle with Torture, Trauma, and the Moral Injuries of War

Clark Savage King of All Things: A Guide to Man's Martial Purpose

Dick Couch A Tactical Ethic: Moral Conduct in the Insurgent Battlespace

Andrew Bacevich Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Misguided Wars

Shauna Springer WARRIOR: How to Support Those Who Protect Us

Jonathan Shay Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

Jonathan Shay Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming

Another podcast:

Martyrmade: Anything That Moves - The My Lai Massacre (w/History on Fire)

Email me at [email protected]

My Substack

It's been quite some time since I have responded to "mail" so I have curated five questions to address:.

1. What should the USAF do now?
2. Is fraud a form of irregular warfare?
3. What should the DoW do with 1.5 trillion dollars?

References:

Unauthorized History of the Pacific War Podcast

RAND wish-casting on drones in 2015.

Slaughterbots (2017)

Slaughterbots: if human: kill() (2021)

How are Drones Changing Modern Warfare?

Sun Tzu The Art of War

Carl von Clausewitz On War

Miyamoto Musashi A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

H. John Poole The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO’s Contribution to Warfare

Christian Brose The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America

My Substack

Email at [email protected]

I examine the strategic deficit disorder that absolutely dominates the US and western military establishments

I speak to the tools and critical thinking modalities that could spark and encourage competent martial imagination. Moral courage is necessary to tell the flag officer dullards and their Senior Executive Service (SES) necromancers that the emperor has no clothes.

If not, the unblemished record of defeat and stalemate will continue.

I describe some of the reasons I do it and the techniques I employ to get the single most accurate picture of what happened then to determine what’s going on now.

Note: The list of sources is limited here due to RSS but my Substack is more comprehensive.

Recommended Listening:

On Strategic Empathy

Recommended Reading:

Christian Madsbjerg Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

Johnson and Abbe Developing Strategic Empathy and Perspective Taking in Military

Zachary Shore A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind

Dave Snowden Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World

Mortimer Adler How To Read a Book

Robert Strassler The Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika (Landmark Series)

Mike Snook How Can Man Die Better: The Secrets of Isandlwana Revealed

Mike Snook Like Wolves on the Fold: The Defence of Rorke’s Drift

David Stahel Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East

David Hackett Fischer Historians' Fallacies : Toward a Logic of Historical Thought

Keith Windschuttle The Killing of History

John Burrow A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century

Harry Elmer Barnes A History of Historical Writing

US Army Center of Military History

My Substack

Email at [email protected]

Episode 100!

Well, when I combine the 20 episodes of WarNotes with the CG podcasts but a chance to pop the bubbly anyway.

Today we discuss the critical lack of critical thinking that has led the US into the unenviable position of being an extraordinarily 20th century fighting force nor fit for purpose for 21st century peer combat.

It will get worse.

I'll offer some more recommendations and a path forward.

References:

Richard Feynman Cargo Cult speech at CalTech 1974

RAND wish-casting on drones in 2015.

Slaughterbots (2017)

Slaughterbots: if human: kill() (2021)

How are Drones Changing Modern Warfare?

Sun Tzu The Art of War

Carl von Clausewitz On War

Miyamoto Musashi A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

H. John Poole The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO’s Contribution to Warfare

Christian Brose The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America

My Substack

Email at [email protected]

I'll discuss Iran and the grunt math of salvo competition.

Buppert’s Law of Military Topography:

“Mountainous terrain held by riflemen who know what they are about cannot be militarily defeated.”

For other insight on Iran, I recommend CG episodes 061 , 067 and 078.

References:

The Boogeyman of 21st-Century Warfare: Drones

Why the US is facing strategic defeat

Points of Resistance and Departure: An interview with James C. Scott

Lester Grau and Charles J. Bartles Mountain Warfare and Other Lofty Problems: Foreign mountain combat veterans discuss movement and maneuver, training and resupply (Helion Studies in Military History)

Lester Grau The Bear Went Over The Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics In Afghanistan [Illustrated Edition]

Lester Grau The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War

Mark Thompson The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919

James C. Scott The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

Sun Tzu The Art of War

Carl von Clausewitz On War

Miyamoto Musashi A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

H. John Poole The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO’s Contribution to Warfare

Christian Brose The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

Qiao Liang & Wang Xiangsui Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email at [email protected].