War Lab — Logistics Under Fire: How the U.S. Army Plans to Survive a Contested War

In this episode of The War Lab, we open the command-planning documents and step deep inside one of the most consequential transformations underway in modern warfare: the total redesign of U.S. Army sustainment for large-scale combat operations. This isn’t a tweak to doctrine or a marginal efficiency gain—it’s a philosophical reset driven by a single hard truth: in a war against a peer adversary, logistics will be hunted, disrupted, deceived, and destroyed.

We break down the rise of contested logistics, where every movement across land, sea, air, space, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum is under persistent surveillance and precision threat. The era of safe rear areas, massive stockpiles, and predictable resupply is over. Survival now depends on dispersion, deception, speed, and data.

At the heart of this episode is the Army’s radical organizational shift: the Light Support Battalion (LSB) and its three-node cluster concept, which shatters the traditional brigade support area into mobile, redundant logistics launch centers designed to survive missile strikes, drone swarms, and deep fires. We explain why forward support companies were eliminated, how maintenance and distribution were centralized, and the real risks this places on junior leaders tasked with managing brigade-wide sustainment under fire.

From there, we dive into the technological backbone of the transformation. You’ll learn how predictive sustainment, powered by item-level tracking, unified data architecture, and AI-assisted analytics, is moving logistics from reactive to anticipatory—fixing equipment before it fails and allocating supplies before shortages emerge. We examine how enterprise systems are being rebuilt, why data integrity is now a warfighting requirement, and how sustainment leaders are using commercially available tools to generate a single trusted operational picture.

The episode also explores the physical fight to move supplies when roads, ports, and airfields are contested. We cover autonomous resupply vessels, cargo drones, last-mile aerial delivery systems, and the growing role of additive manufacturing—where soldiers can fabricate critical parts at the point of need instead of waiting on fragile global supply chains. Logistics, in this model, is no longer passive support—it’s a maneuver element.

We then turn to the human dimension: how logistics officers are now trained as sensors, drone operators, and base defenders; how reconstitution models like Iron Forge regenerate combat power in hours instead of weeks; and where dangerous capability gaps remain—from expeditionary port opening in the Pacific to sustainment in the Arctic and amphibious medical evacuation under A2/AD threat.

Finally, we confront the most controversial idea of all: offensive logistics. Sustainment forces using their own signatures, data, and mobility to deceive, fix, and destroy the enemy’s ability to fight—turning logistics into a weapon in the deep battle.

This episode is a deep, unflinching look at how wars are actually won—or lost—before the first maneuver unit ever reaches the objective. If you want to understand the future of conflict, you have to understand how armies will feed, fuel, repair, and regenerate under fire.

Welcome to The War Lab.

Skirmishing Mist — How Infantry Must Learn to Vanish to Survive 2030

Description:
In this episode of War Lab we dismantle a startling prescription for the future of light infantry: become a professional ghost. Based on the Australian DSTG’s “Skirmishing Mist” concept, we trace a radical body-and-soul redesign of dismounted warfare driven by one grim insight — in a world of ubiquitous sensors, precision strike, and AI-fast decision loops, surviving by incremental upgrades to rifles and optics is no longer an option. You either change the whole force, or you get wiped out.

We walk through the concept’s core logic: dispersion, autonomy, and signature denial. Skirmishing Mist (SM) insists on the D3 imperative — disconnected, disaggregated, decentralized — building small autonomous teams that operate systematically below the adversary’s detection threshold. These teams aren’t designed to seize and hold terrain; they exist to fragment enemy command, expose critical nodes, and cue remote killers. Think of them as vapor: they form, strike surgically, and evaporate, leaving the heavy brigade free to exploit the resulting chaos.

Episode highlights:
• Why the battlefield’s “perfect storm” of sensors + precision + AI makes traditional platoon formations existentially vulnerable, and why stealth must become doctrine rather than an add-on.
• The D5 principle of kinetic restraint: skirmishers are explicitly tasked to disrupt — destroy, degrade, deny, deceive — not to slug it out. Major fires are remotely procured by a supporting strike regiment and UCAV mother ships; the forward team’s job is to sense, tag, and vanish.
• Anatomy of the force: the 20-soldier baseline (and the expert preference for a 12-soldier survivable team) organized into five cells — command, reconnaissance, pioneer, SEMA (cyber/electromagnetic), and strike — with modular augmentation for HUMINT, PSYOPS, medics, or air defense.
• The technology suite that enables invisibility: passive multispectral sensing, ubiquitous unattended ground sensors, smart dust tagging, hydrogen fuel cells for near-silent power, meta-materials for thermal and radar masking, and AI-enabled C2 that predicts team movement and allocates remote fires while minimizing radio traffic.
• The comms paradox and the UAV courier: how operational security forces a one-way broadcast and physical data couriers, imposing latency that makes local decision-making mandatory and warps command relationships.
• Logistics as the concept’s Achilles’ heel: the “logistical paradox” — an invisible, dispersed D3 force still depends on vulnerable aerial resupply and sustainment networks — and why resilient low-signature sustainment is the next design imperative.
• Legal and ethical seams: the controversial “AI judge” that vets proportionality and ROE in near-real time, and the enormous human capital demands placed on decentralized commanders required to make legally and ethically fraught decisions at machine speed.
• War-gamed strengths and limits: where SM excels (complex jungle, distributed urban pressure) and where it struggles (fixed subterranean networks, chemical ambushes, and mass casualty scenarios).

We close by asking the hard questions every defense planner faces: can you realistically train and trust a generation of small-unit commanders to operate in isolation, juggle legal accountability, and act with near-total autonomy? Can a society accept the logistics and ethical costs of a force designed to be unseen? And if stealth becomes the new baseline for survival, how will that reshape doctrine, procurement, and military culture?

Join us for a demanding, forensic look at a concept that may not be science fiction for long — and at the very real choices it forces on the way we organize, equip, and morally govern our soldiers in the age of lethal transparency.

Dynamic Space: The Fight for Orbital Supremacy Has Already Begun

In this episode of The War Lab, we take you inside the most important strategic transformation underway in modern warfare: the shift from a static, predictable space architecture to a fully maneuverable, combat-ready orbital force. What the U.S. built for peaceful dominance in the late 20th century is now a glaring vulnerability—and China is exploiting that gap faster than many policymakers realize.

We explore why Dynamic Space Operations (DSO) are no longer an abstract concept but a hard requirement for preserving space superiority. That means sustained maneuver, refueling and repair in orbit, modular payload swaps, rapid launch, and a logistics network that turns space into a fluid operational domain rather than a graveyard of satellites locked into Keplerian orbits.

You’ll hear how China’s Shijian satellites are already demonstrating refueling, proximity operations, coordinated multi-vehicle maneuvers, and robotic arms capable of grabbing or disabling U.S. assets—evidence of a real, ongoing campaign to master orbital warfare. And you’ll learn why U.S. systems, despite their sophistication, behave like predictable blimps in space—easily tracked, easily targeted, and unable to maneuver without exhausting precious fuel.

From here, we walk through the pillars required to flip the script:
• On-orbit refueling, servicing, and modular upgrades that radically extend satellite life and utility.
• Nuclear thermal and nuclear electric propulsion, the key to escaping the tyranny of the rocket equation and achieving real maneuver warfare in space.
• Distributed, mobile command-and-control, optical cross-links, and spectrum agility that eliminate single points of failure.
• Responsive launch, including allied “Starlift” concepts, that allow the U.S. and NATO to replace or augment constellations within hours—not years.
• In-space assembly and deception, creating unpredictable spacecraft, surprise payload deployments, decoys, and mission ambiguity that force adversaries to spend enormous resources tracking shadows.

But DSO comes with its own challenges: the complexity of continuous maneuver, authority to expend fuel in wartime, gaps in ISR during service windows, and a legal and regulatory vacuum that has allowed commercial mega-constellations to accelerate an orbital debris crisis approaching Kessler-syndrome levels.

We close by examining what may be the most controversial shift of all: the potential need for a future human guardian in space. As repair, troubleshooting, and combat interaction grow more complex, the U.S. may face a strategic cost if it cedes human spaceflight experience to a competitor already gaining operational reps.

This is one of our most comprehensive deep dives yet—an essential briefing for anyone trying to understand the future character of war and why space, more than any other domain, will define who holds strategic advantage in the decades ahead.

Tune in to The War Lab and step into the frontier where orbital mechanics meet military necessity, and where the race for competitive endurance in space is already underway.

In this episode of The War Lab, we conduct a rigorous examination of the most high-risk operational profile in modern conflict: the Singleton. We trace the brutal doctrinal evolution of the solitary operator—the individual soldier placed deep inside enemy-controlled territory, where survival is often secondary to mission execution.

We explore the history, tradecraft, and future of the operator who works in total isolation, including:

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  The Origins of Calculated Sacrifice: We analyze the "suicide squad" mentality of WWII’s British Auxiliary Units—human tripwires hidden in underground bunkers with a projected life expectancy of just 12 days.

  
  

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  Cold War Stay-Behind Networks: A deep dive into the clandestine world of Detachment A in West Berlin and the "Green Light" teams tasked with the ultimate one-way mission: detonating backpack nuclear weapons (SADMs) to stop a Soviet advance.

  
  

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  Modern Manhunting & AFO: How units like Delta Force’s G Squadron and the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA) industrialized the "Grey Man" concept to fix high-value targets in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  
  

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  The Legal Gray Zone: The crushing personal risk of operating between Title 10 military status and Title 50 covert action, where a captured operator faces execution as a spy rather than protection as a prisoner of war.

  
  

• The Future of the Hyper-Enabled Operator: We look at the pivot to "cognitive overmatch," where single soldiers control autonomous drone swarms via AR headsets. We ask the critical question: Does this technology make the operator a lethal tactical headquarters, or just an illuminated electronic target for the enemy?.

  
  

Join us as we dissect the continuous thread of calculated risk that connects the desperate saboteurs of 1940 to the digital ghost warriors of 2040.

In this episode of The War Lab, we unpack one of the least understood but most consequential transformations underway in China’s military ecosystem: the sweeping overhaul of its nationwide militia system. Far from a relic of Maoist “people’s war,” the militia is being re-engineered into a modern, specialized reserve force tied directly into the PLA’s joint warfighting architecture—and the implications for regional conflict are profound.

We trace the origins of Beijing’s 2018 reform campaign, driven by a blunt internal assessment: before China could build a strong militia, it had to build a real one. That meant rooting out fake enlistments, hollow units, bureaucratic double-counting, and peacetime dysfunction. Only after that cleanup could the transition to “getting strong” begin—a transition aimed squarely at wartime readiness.

From cyber specialists embedded in major tech firms, to maritime militia units operating alongside the China Coast Guard in contested waters, China’s once-disparate militia forces are now being shaped into a highly structured support arm for PLA operations across every domain: air, land, sea, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum. We break down how this new force is organized, what missions it’s being trained for, and how Beijing is using financial incentives, civilian–military partnerships, new training bases, and joint exercises with the PLA to hardwire militia units into campaigns that could shape the opening hours of a Taiwan or South China Sea conflict.

But the reforms also face friction: limited budgets, uneven implementation, short training cycles, and the inherent challenge of turning civilian professionals—often available for only 7–12 days a year—into reliable wartime assets. We examine these limitations honestly, while highlighting pockets of real capability that Beijing is clearly proud of, from advanced UAV reconnaissance teams to elite cyber units providing security during major political events.

Finally, we explore what indicators analysts should watch as China moves toward the next Five-Year Plan: whether rhetoric shifts beyond the “real-to-strong” phase, whether training days increase, and whether militia units appear more consistently in full-scale PLA joint exercises. Because taken together, these reforms represent something far larger than a reserve-force tune-up—they reveal how China is mobilizing its entire national base of talent, technology, and industry for modern conflict.

If you want to understand China’s real mobilization power—and the strategic warning signs hidden in plain sight—this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Today on War Lab: Exploring the Future of Conflict — we unpack one of the sharpest, most consequential confrontations in the Western Hemisphere: an unprecedented concentration of U.S. military power off Venezuela and the legal, clandestine, and diplomatic campaign built to force regime change.

In this episode we trace how a carrier strike group, an amphibious readiness group with a Marine Expeditionary Unit, resurrected Cold-War infrastructure at Roosevelt Roads, and a layered ISR/strike architecture (F-35Bs, B-52s, MQ-9s, BACN, and ~200 Tomahawks at sea) combine with novel legal doctrine and covert action to create a pressure campaign unlike anything the region has seen in decades. We detail the administration’s controversial legal move — treating major trafficking syndicates as FTOs and declaring a non-international armed conflict — and how that reclassification permits lethal military strikes at sea instead of traditional law-enforcement interdictions.

What you’ll learn:
• What the force posture actually looks like, why it’s historically extreme, and what it can — and can’t — do.
• How the NIA legal framework converts a criminal problem into a military targeting problem, and why that matters for due process and international law.
• The secret war: CIA, FBI/HSI covert ops, a failed rendition plot, and a public campaign designed to fracture Maduro’s inner circle.
• Diplomatic play and regional alignments — why Trinidad & Tobago’s pivot is a strategic coup for Washington.
• The likely endgames: a psychological campaign that forces an internal collapse, or a grim choice to escalate (targeted air strikes, SOF capture/kill, or conventional seizures) — and the catastrophic risks of miscalculation.

Crisp, sourced, and unflinching — this episode is a must-listen for anyone tracking the future of coercion, law, and war in America’s backyard. Tune in and ask: if coercion fails, what is the next step — and who will pay the price?

In this episode of War Lab, we step into the shattered world of modern espionage — a world where invisibility has vanished, tradecraft has collapsed, and every action leaves a permanent trace in the digital ether. The romantic era of Cold War spying — coded drops, shadowed meetings, and whispered secrets — is over. Welcome to the Glass House, where ubiquitous technical surveillance makes hiding nearly impossible.

Host Chris Hedgecock dissects how the very foundations of intelligence — cover and tradecraft — have been obliterated by a planet blanketed in sensors, cameras, cell towers, and AI-driven analytics. In the Glass House, trying to hide isn’t stealth — it’s suspicious. Algorithms can now detect silence itself, flagging any deviation from the endless hum of normal digital life.

From CIA networks burned by their own operational patterns to the collapse of non-official cover in the age of LinkedIn and social media, this episode explores how the spy’s greatest skillset has become their greatest liability. Physical disguise is obsolete; gait recognition, body-shape analysis, and multimodal biometric fusion can identify a person from a kilometer away — even with their face hidden.

But this isn’t just a story of loss — it’s a story of transformation. Hedgecock traces the rise of advertising intelligence (AdINT), where vast streams of commercial data — geolocation, app telemetry, genomic profiles — have become the new battlefield. He unpacks how a civilian data scientist once uncovered a top-secret JSOC base in Syria using nothing more than open-market ad data, and how this revelation forced the U.S. to redefine personal data as a matter of national security.

We also enter the age of agentic AI, where autonomous reasoning systems now compress the intelligence cycle from collection to action at machine speed. Platforms like Scale AI’s Donovan and Vanavar Labs’ Archer are reshaping espionage itself — but they also expose a dangerous truth: America’s most advanced intelligence infrastructure may no longer be sovereign. When the Pentagon’s critical AI tools are owned and shaped by private tech giants, what does that mean for national power in an era of “rented superpowers”?

Finally, War Lab returns to the human element — the one domain AI still can’t replicate. In a world where machines collect every fact, the new spy’s mission is no longer to gather information, but to verify it and understand intent — the thoughts, motives, and plans still locked inside human minds.

Themes explored:

• The collapse of traditional espionage under ubiquitous technical surveillance

• AI-driven biometric tracking and the death of anonymity

• The commercialization of intelligence and rise of AdINT

• Agentic AI and the “rented superpower” problem

• The enduring human role: validating machine intelligence and uncovering intent

Listen to learn: why the future of espionage may depend not on hiding better — but on redefining what it means to know anything at all.

In this episode of War Lab we trace a quiet, epochal re-engineering of American national security: how the Cold War continuity-of-government (COG) apparatus was repurposed — legally, operationally, and physically — into a near-permanent “shadow government” designed to survive and sustain a vastly broader set of catastrophes. This isn’t a 9/11 origin story. It’s a story about preparation, policy, and power that began months before the attacks and accelerated in their wake.

Hosts take you inside the doctrine, the bunkers, and the personalities — especially Vice President Dick Cheney and his counsel David Addington — who transformed continuity planning from a doomsday contingency into an enduring, executive-led operational system.

What you’ll hear

• A clear, chronological unpacking of COG’s Cold War foundations (Mount Weather, Raven Rock, Greenbrier) and the three-part continuity doctrine (COG / COOP / ECG).

• The May 2001 policy pivot that put Cheney in charge of preparing for catastrophic WMD terrorism — and why 9/11 was an accelerant, not the origin.

• How the PEOC bunker moment on 9/11 produced immediate operational orders (including the shoot-down authorization) and the simultaneous birth of expansive legal rationales.

• The logistics and human cost of a perpetual shadow government: rotating teams of senior officials, 90-day bunker cycles, and constant readiness.

• The legal architecture that enabled secrecy and executive control: the unitary executive theory, the Addington legal strategy, and NSPD-51’s transformative language (the catastrophic emergency trigger and “cooperation as a matter of courtesy”).

• The constitutional stakes: how the program reshaped the balance among the branches and what it means for oversight, democratic legitimacy, and the future of emergency governance.

Why it matters
This episode shows that continuity planning is not merely a technical contingency; it’s a political and constitutional project. The structures put in place to ensure survival also concentrated power, shielded policy from oversight, and enshrined a legal framework that grants broad unilateral authority to the executive in “catastrophic” circumstances. Those arrangements remain official policy today — and the questions they raise about sovereignty, accountability, and the resilience of constitutional government are urgent.

Listen if you want to understand

• How national survival planning became national governance planning.

• Why secrecy and legal theory matter as much as bunkers and emergency rations.

• The human and institutional tradeoffs baked into perpetual emergency readiness.

• The contours of a debate that will shape the next major crisis: who should decide what counts as a catastrophic emergency — and who should run the country when it happens?

Tune in for a rigorous, historically grounded, and unflinching look at how continuity became power — and what that means for democracy in an age of new threats.

The Black Sea has always been more than a map feature—it’s a crucible of power, a maritime bottleneck where empire, geography, and ambition have collided for millennia. In this episode of War Lab, we dive deep into the evolving struggle for control over this body of water that has once again become one of the most strategically charged frontiers on Earth.

From ancient Troy and the Ottoman Empire to the Cold War’s delicate balance and today’s brutal war in Ukraine, the Black Sea has served as the pivot of Eurasian power. Russia’s centuries-long drive for access to warm-water ports has shaped its very identity, and the city of Sevastopol—founded in 1783—became the heart of that ambition. But now, for the first time in history, that bastion of Russian naval dominance is collapsing from within.

Through a mix of deep historical analysis and cutting-edge military insight, this episode explores how a war fought with drones, missiles, and data links has rewritten the rules of naval warfare. The once-mighty Russian Black Sea Fleet—rebuilt after the Cold War as a “fortress fleet” bristling with Kalibr cruise missiles and layered defenses—has been systematically dismantled by a nation with almost no navy at all. Ukraine’s mastery of asymmetry—land-based anti-ship missiles, explosive sea drones, and real-time satellite control—has rendered traditional surface fleets obsolete in contested littoral zones.

We trace the story from Catherine the Great’s annexation of Crimea to the Montreux Convention that made Turkey the eternal gatekeeper of the straits, from the Moskva’s fiery sinking to the rise of the naval drone swarms that now dominate the western Black Sea. What began as a conventional naval campaign has become a case study in how cheap, networked systems can defeat billion-dollar warships.

The implications reach far beyond the region. The Black Sea has become the world’s most consequential testing ground for the future of maritime conflict. Its lessons challenge a century of naval orthodoxy—from Mahan’s “big ship” doctrine to the very idea of sea control itself. Can massive fleets still survive in the age of precision strike and autonomous warfare? Or has the network—the swarm—replaced the ship as the new measure of sea power?

Finally, we turn to the geopolitics shaping the next phase. Turkey’s control of the straits, NATO’s evolving posture on its southeastern flank, and the question of whether Russia can ever rebuild its fleet all converge in this episode. The “fortress Crimea” has been breached, the “Soviet lake” drained of its dominance, and a new maritime order is emerging—one defined not by size or tonnage, but by intelligence, adaptability, and distributed power.

Shattered Bastion: The Black Sea reveals how one of the world’s oldest naval battlegrounds became the proving ground for the future of war at sea—and why what happens here will define the balance of power far beyond its shores.

Kaliningrad—Russia’s heavily militarized enclave on the Baltic Sea—is both a sword and a shield, a fortress and a vulnerability. Once envisioned as a “Hong Kong of the Baltic,” it became something very different: Moscow’s forward-deployed bastion in Europe, armed with nuclear-capable missiles, dense air defenses, and naval strike forces capable of threatening NATO’s heartland. But as the tides of war and geopolitics shift, that fortress may now stand on crumbling ground.

In this episode of War Lab, we dissect the Kaliningrad Paradox—how Russia’s most formidable outpost has evolved into one of its most exposed liabilities. We explore the anatomy of the exclave’s defenses: from its S-400 “no-fly” envelope and Iskander-M ballistic missiles to the degraded remnants of its once-proud 11th Army Corps. We trace how the war in Ukraine hollowed out its ground forces and how the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO has turned the Baltic Sea into a “NATO Lake,” surrounding Kaliningrad on all sides.

The discussion dives into the doctrine that makes Kaliningrad dangerous—the Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) strategy designed to paralyze NATO’s decision-making and deter reinforcement of the Baltic states. We examine how these systems interact to create an overlapping bubble of air, land, and sea denial—and how NATO can systematically dismantle it by targeting the vulnerable “nervous system” of radars, command posts, and sensor networks that sustain it.

At the center of the analysis lies the Suwałki Gap—a 65-kilometer strip of land between Poland and Lithuania that could determine the fate of NATO’s eastern flank. Long seen as the Alliance’s Achilles’ heel, it is also Russia’s lifeline to Kaliningrad. If conflict comes, it could become the most contested corridor in Europe—a kill zone for both sides.

Finally, we assess the transformation of the exclave in the wake of Nordic enlargement. With every Baltic coastline now under NATO control, Russia’s once-formidable stronghold has become an isolated, brittle “poison pill”—dangerous in its capacity for coercion and escalation, yet unsustainable in a prolonged war.

The episode concludes with the key question for NATO planners: How do you neutralize a fortress without triggering catastrophe? We unpack strategic recommendations—blinding Kaliningrad’s reconnaissance-strike complex, enforcing total maritime isolation, and turning the Alliance’s new geography into an advantage.

War Lab brings you inside the evolving architecture of modern deterrence—where military geography, doctrine, and technology converge to shape the balance of power. In this episode, the fortress at Kaliningrad is no longer just a Russian weapon—it’s a strategic riddle for NATO in the age of renewed great-power confrontation.