Category: Expert Analysis

I enlisted in a hurry. I had been living with my girlfriend for a while and working as a parts slinger for a racing company out of Connecticut while she split her time between taking school photos and manning amusement park rides. None of our jobs came with health insurance, so when she got so […]

The idea of our own government spying on American citizens is a bit disturbing, and SOFREP has covered this in the past. While we can acknowledge this concern, as a society we can also learn to appreciate all of the ways our government tries to keep us safe. After spending a few years as a technical surveillance […]

Americans dangerously underestimate the complexity and ambiguous nature of Taiwan’s feelings about the mainland, and the emotional force this issue arouses on both sides…“ In his farewell address, George Washington warned the country to avoid entangling foreign alliances. In the Cold War era following the end of World War Two, Washington’s wise advice seems to […]

President Obama’s recent decision to grant Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) expanded authorities in the fight against terrorism likely came as welcome news to many. Anything that means we move more quickly and nimbly in hunting the enemy has to be welcome. Here is the reality, however. We are in this war for the long […]

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has drawn criticism once again, this time, from President Elect Donald Trump. The incoming president took to Twitter to voice his concerns about the high costs associated with the development of the F-35, which is on track to become the most expensive weapons system in human history by a wide […]

Tim’s new book, to a climber seeking out new challenging peaks to conquer, is like discovering some mystical elf on some craggy outcropping while attempting a difficult summit. This strange creature whispers for you to follow him, and something inside you tells you to do exactly this. He rounds a jagged death drop of a […]

By now, we all already know that social media is ripe with bad headlines from fake news sites that somehow manage to be shared time and time again, despite coming from pages with domains like “ObamaReptileConspiracy.biz.”  The media has decided to make these fake news distributors this week’s pariah, faulting them for Hillary Clinton losing […]

We’ve all had jobs that asked a lot of us. Sometimes the work that needs to get done requires more hours than it seems like any sane person would give, leaving you and your coworkers with no choice but to find ways to make another few hours bearable, another long night survivable, and another humorless […]

The word refugee has a number of connotations in today’s social climate.  Concerns about refugees from Syria have made the term politically polarizing.  With one group concerned about the security of the nations that takes them in, and the other concerned about the well-being of the refugees themselves, neither party is objectively wrong.  To be […]

A Russian-owned media outlet announced plans for the new submersible drone this week.  The drone, called Surrogat, has been designed to “realistically reproduce the physical fields of the enemy—the acoustic and electromagnetic.”  In other words, it’s been designed to mimic the signals produced by submarines, potentially fooling enemy vessels into thinking it’s any number of […]

After 70 or so kilometers of travel, humping a 100 pound large Alice pack over mountainous terrain for the previous several days and living on minimal food I was a walking zombie. I had just finished navigating my small element to a road intersected by a large river, “Sgt this is our point”. Our Cadre […]

In 1958, the United States Air Force launched Project A119, also known as “A Study of Lunar Research Flights.”  While the US would not visit the moon with a manned mission for eleven more years, this project involved sending something quite different to the lunar surface: a nuclear missile. As the United States and the […]