Strategy Shelf

Dispatches & Publications on Defense, Freedom, & Security

Advocation: Stand-Up “R4 Corps” Volunteer and Selective National Service

Advocation: The U.S. should stand up an “R4 Corps” as a rapid civilian defense, freedom, and security workforce adapting to the rising militancy of autocratic nuclear and proxy powers. The Mission “R4” could mean “Restore-Recycle, Retrofit, Remake, and Repurpose,” four activities applicable to all weapons, aircraft, drones, robots, munitions, vehicles,…

Tackling a Big History Lie Fueling Putin’s Xi-Jinping-Aided Aggression

Despite Beijing’s global posturing in support of national sovereignty it uses sleight of hand to export “dual use” technology (civilian and military) to supply Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine’s sovereignty. Yet Ukraine’s sovereignty is a matter of widespread international recognition. China’s strategy seems simple: tax Ukraine and the West…

The Red Balloon: PRC Research Survey Ship Role?

Early morning February 12th, Japan’s Defense Ministry protested a Chinese PLAN survey vessel potentially violating Japan’s territorial waters, with Asahi Shimbun reporting seven such incidents since 2021.   As of 2020, China’s research vessel fleet was the largest of research fleets in the Pacific according to CSIS’s Asia Maritime Transparency…

Russia’s Gray Warfare in Space Requires Gray Warfare Response

Reportedly, Russia put what was ostensibly a mobile satellite repair vehicle into Earth’s orbit to move among and service Russian satellites. In time, it showed its later purpose as a fragmentation shell with plasma boosters to put U.S. and other satellites in harm’s way of its debris stream. According to a…

Designate Wagner Group and Putin Regime as a Transnational Terrorist Joint Venture in Ukraine

Ukraine and similarly situated independent states on Russia’s periphery suffer under the U.N. fiction that international humanitarian law (law of war or IHL) governs to protect them from a U.N.S.C. veto-wielding Russia while it is under the sway of Putin’s expansionist regime. It does not. The buck has never stopped…

Balloons: Identify Payload, Source, and Best Practices

The payload of an atmospheric balloon, at whatever elevation, is usually what the balloon is carrying beneath it. We should also consider whether what is inside the balloon itself may be part of the payload. If not done already we should figure out how to discern all payload information before…

Russia’s Military Movements on Ukraine

Strategically it is best to see Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine in the context of his intelligence apparatus’s 20-year gray war of psychological, emotional, and political influence against targeted populations in the West. Among strategic objectives leading-up to the invasion of Ukraine Putin pursued a range of combined objectives…

China’s Ukraine Issues

It appears the PRC has put itself into a knot of contradiction wherever it has by deed or word supported dictator-President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine to make Eurasia less multipolar and more unipolar despite the SCO’s stated multipolar purpose. Mutually supporting bipolar militarism in the East is…

The “Pravitel” Prerogative

Putin’s chosen prerogative as the presumed “pravitel” (правитель) over Russia trends in extinguishing the lives of generations of young and middle aged Russian and Ukrainian men on the outdated delusion that the prize of expansive imperial buffer territory is worth all the lives he can spend. I have heard arguments from academics…

The U.S. Military Industrial Complex Did Not Attack Ukraine

Russian, Chinese, and proxy troll networks have been falsely blaming the U.S. military industrial complex (MIC) for Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine and to divert attention from Xi Jinping’s transformation of China into something of a divine emperor cult. These dictators act as if World War 2 and the holocaust…