Think.Fight.Learn.Repeat.

Wargaming has gone from a niche practice to something turning up in think tank headlines, service mandates, and hobby shops. This week's guest, Sebastian Bae, has been at the centre of that surge. Sebastian is a senior game designer and research scientist at CNA, a former US Marine Corps infantry sergeant, and the designer of the Littoral Commander wargame series, which is now now used across the joint force, by partner militaries throughout the region, and, as it turns out, aboard at least one PLA Navy ship.

During this episode we get into what's actually driving the boom, and all the ways a wargame can go wrong, whether its rigged designs, general officers putting a thumb on the scale, or the Japanese games played before Midway. Sebastian explains why the Indo-Pacific breaks the World War II paradigm most players bring to the table, what it means when your adversary picks up your game, and why "empty map syndrome" makes unilateral games a poor guide to how a crisis would really unfold.

This week on Think.Fight.Learn.Repeat., we sit down with Max Brooks, author of World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide, who has spent two decades briefing generals, red-teaming with the Marine Corps, and turning worst-case scenarios into real lessons for the people who plan for them.

In this episode, we discuss which parts of World War Z have eerily come true, why fiction beats a briefing every time, his thoughts on "predictable surprises", and a look at his next book.

This is a conversation about storytelling, national psychology, and the fiction surrounding it.

Everyone knows John Boyd as "the OODA loop guy," but he was much more than that. In this episode, I sit down with Ian Brown, a Boyd historian who spent nearly a decade inside the archives poring over decades of briefings, transcripts, and slides to separate the man from the meme.

We dig into why Boyd refused to publish a formal book, why he wouldn't let anyone walk away with his slides without sitting through the briefing, and why his 1976 essay, Destruction and Creation, and not the OODA loop, is the framework behind his thoughts and presentations.

Drawing on Ian's two books, A New Conception of War and the newly released Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals, he makes the case that Boyd was never really finished thinking and that reducing him to four boxes and an arrow loses almost everything that made him worth listening to in the first place.

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Anthony King to discuss his new book, AI, Automation, and War, and what the rise of artificial intelligence actually means for the future of military command and conflict.

Moving beyond the familiar “killer robots” narrative, Dr. King argues that AI is more likely to augment military decision making than replace human judgment. We explore how AI is being absorbed into the increasingly collective nature of modern command, whether algorithms could transform the relationship between commanders and staff, and whether human oversight risks becoming a rubber stamp.

The war in Ukraine will end sometime, but what happens next? In this episode, retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe, joins us to break down the next flashpoint on NATO's map: the Baltics.

We discuss why he believes Crimea will decide the outcome of the War in Ukraine, why he calls Russia's nuclear threats a "myth" designed to freeze Western decision making, and whether that logic changes once you're talking about a NATO member state. We get into the hard geography of the Baltics and what Russia's Eastern Flank pressure campaign of drones, sabotage, and gray zone warfare really mean to NATO.

In part 2 of my conversation with Dan Rice, Co-Director of the US Marine Corps War College's China Warfighting Initiative, we go deeper into the doctrinal weeds and the stakes get higher.

From the structural similarities between MDO and China's Systems Warfare approach, to the terrifying escalation ladder of striking dual-use targets on the Chinese mainland, this episode focuses on a difficult question - are we prepared for a moment where operational assumptions may prove false?

In the first part of a two part episode, Lex sits down with Dan Rice, Deputy Director of the US Marine Corps War College's China Warfighting Initiative, to break down the doctrinal concepts underpinning how the PLA thinks about and plans for modern warfare, with a focus on the Taiwan Contingency.

From Mao-era strategic principles to cutting-edge systems destruction warfare, Dan pulls back the curtain on how China's military thinks about conflict not as a clash of platforms, but as a competition between opposing operational systems, and why that distinction matters for how the US and its allies prepare.

What does it take to build a grassroots movement inside rigid institutions like Western Armed Forces?

In this episode of Think.Fight.Learn.Repeat., we sit down with Colonel Arnel David, US Army Special Operations veteran, NATO strategist, and co-founder of Fight Club International (FCI), to trace his journey from Infantry Officer to Co-Founder.

Arnel opens up about the frustration that sparked Fight Club and a hunch that commercial-off-the-shelf games and simulations could do more. From there, we discuss what makes Fight Club fundamentally different from traditional wargaming organizations, how a rankless, volunteer-run community became a testing ground for AI, LLMs, and unconventional strategy, and why he believes the confidence to be disruptive is in short supply in the military and beyond.

We also talk about growing pains, like what happens when a grassroots idea scales faster than expected and how founders learn to lean on each other's strengths to keep the momentum going.

Western Armies are trying to do too many things with too few resources. That's not a controversial statement, in fact it's the opening line of a paper that's been turning heads in defence circles since it landed in April 2026.

In this episode, we sit down with Nick Moran, a 20-year British Army veteran who served in the Special Mission Unit community, with NATO, and alongside the Royal Gurkha Rifles, to dig into his RealClearDefense piece, "Repurposing the British Army." Nick argues that what's needed isn't a minor adjustment. It's a fundamental reframing of how the British Army thinks about itself.

We get into the case for anchoring British force design to the Nordic region, why geography has to come before capability, and what Norway has to do with UK national security. We talk about the three master effects of land power: Hold, Turn, andStrike, and whether the British Army has quietly lost the art ofdefence after two decades of counterinsurgency. We also tackle the hardest question of all: how do you generate mass in war when you're running a professional army in peace?

Nick also pulls no punches on conscription, the vague "three years to be ready" warning, and what the lessons of Ukraine actually mean for how Britain should be building its force today.

The Arctic doesn't forgive mistakes, it punishes them.

In this episode, I sit down with Dylan Abbott, an instructor at the Canadian Army's Advanced Warfare Centre, where he teaches Arctic warfare and survival. Dylan breaks down what it truly takes to operate in one of the most unforgiving environments on earth, from the core skills every soldier must master to the mindset required to keep going when the cold, the isolation, and the terrain are working against you.

We cover the most common mistakes soldiers make when they first encounter the Arctic, why small errors can become life-threatening problems fast, how much equipment actually matters versus skills and discipline, and what modern forces still get wrong about operating in the high north.

If you've ever wanted to understand what Arctic warfare really demands of the people involved, this one's for you.