I’m an research assistant at a DC-area FFRDC, where I study all kinds of operational aspects of modern defense and the U.S. military. I also explore the bureaucracy of DoD from time to time (read: on a regular basis). There’s a subset of this area that particularly fascinates me; a dynamic, evolving field that I’m just beginning to grasp some basic aspects of.  It goes by many names: Fourth Generation War (4GW), ‘Futurewar’, another Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Whatever you call it, it’s obvious that something fundamental in the way mankind fights itself is changing dramatically, and at times rapidly.

I started this blog as a graduate student at the London School of Economics, studying history and international relations. My background is much the same, but the main difference is that I’ve generally focused on the past. In this blog I aim to write about the present, and especially the future evolution of war, warfare, and conflict. Some of my past professors who have particularly contributed to my current intellectual state include Frederic Smoler, Jefferson Adams, Christopher Coker, and Michael J. Williams.

Much of the inspiration (and for the first little while, some of the content) for this blog comes from John Robb’s absolutely fantastic Global Guerrillas. Robb is really at the cutting edge of what he’s deemed “open-source warfare” and is now about to dominate the area of resilience over at Resilient Communities. Shlok Vaidya is also one of the thinkers at the forefront of resilience and network-centric war who’s been doing some fantastic work at Neoplat (and writing an astonishingly good series of short fiction). I’m just beginning this journey myself.

In addition to this blog, I wrote a series of articles for the journal Fortnight. Occasionally shorter notes can be found at Rapid Fire Pencil.