Author: Donald Bolduc

By gagging commanders from speaking to Congress, Pentagon leadership trades trust for control, leaving lawmakers blind to battlefield reality and the force less ready to defend the nation.

You cannot make peace with a group that rejects it, you cannot stabilize Gaza with foreign troops the region distrusts, and you cannot replace political courage with cash.

When Washington lets the government grind to a halt over partisan trench fights, it creates a self-inflicted readiness gap that our adversaries are eager to exploit.

Bombing drug boats can rattle a cartel’s supply line for a moment, but as a strategy it seeds legal and ethical trouble, alienates coastal communities we need as partners, and ultimately cedes the long fight to traffickers who adapt faster than we can drop ordnance.

Bombs can shatter buildings and morale for a moment, but they rarely win wars, breeding more enemies than they kill and leaving civilians to carry the burden long after the smoke clears.

With Marco Rubio serving as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, the Trump White House is steering toward another costly small war in Venezuela, an echo chamber for regime change that dismisses sovereignty, sidesteps a cowed Congress, and forgets Powell’s warning that if you break it, you own it.

Trump brands himself anti-globalist, yet his tariffs, combative rhetoric, and forward-leaning deployments bind America more tightly to great-power competition, raising risks to our security and national cohesion.

Treating Venezuela as a target board for drug war theatrics swaps strategy for spectacle and ignores the hard truth that cartel profits, legal ports of entry, and U.S. demand thrive despite bombs, while the real fix lives in reform, cooperation, and treatment.

The U.S. buildup in the Caribbean, paired with covert moves and a push to label cartels as terrorists, reads less like a plan and more like a high-stakes gamble where strategy, law, and morality collide.

After ten tours with SOF, I saw women prove on the battlefield what history already shows: when we hold everyone to the same mission-driven standards, merit wins and the force gets stronger.

Slicing off pieces of Ukraine to placate Putin is not a peace plan; it is a surrender that rewards aggression, betrays our allies, and invites a wider war.

Trump’s cease-fire, built on wishful thinking that Hamas would police itself, stripped away Israel’s deterrent, let a hostile force regroup, and proved that without regional ownership of security and accountability, “peace” is a photo op and a pause before the next round.