After some time in the tank, this episode features the ideas that have brought me back. I introduce the concept of semio-stratocracy, an amalgam of Barthe's/Baudrillard's semiocracy, or rule by signs; and stratocracy, a term for a government dominated by the military. I lay out a kind of semiotic conflict theory drawing on Bateson's work on the double bind, Baudrillard/Wilden's idea of a higher logical order being necessary to displace a system, and Schmitt's concept of the sovereign deciding the state of exception, and defining the normal situation. In this, I venture a new warfighting concept, along with semio-stratocracy itself and also the idea of the weaponized concept, namely sacrificial transparency, to begin to describe an operational logic which can carry us out of a spiraling war logic.