🇺🇸 Veteran | Creator: Formidable Function Notebooks & Journals | Writer: LP/OP Newsletter • Decoding Society, Status & Sport • Posts do not represent the DoW
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Joined February 2024
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I spent 12 years of my 18-year career as an AF Combat Arms Instructor. Invested over 10,000 hours of podium/range time, 1,200+ courses.
Here are 5 concepts I learned that apply beyond the range.
Midterm Election Day is today.
We spend years arguing about the direction of the country, then arrive at the one day when the argument finally meets a decision point.
Voting isn’t an endorsement of everything a candidate believes. Nor is it a declaration the system works perfectly.
It’s an exercise in political agency.
The ballot is one of the few places where conviction must become choice, where abstract preferences meet imperfect alternatives, and where constituents have a formal say in who governs.
Vote.
Across 495 battles, surprise beat a 3-to-1 troop advantage.
Army planning tables say to attack a prepared defense with three times the enemy's strength.
The Army's own database of battles from 1600 to 1973, CDB90, shows how often the attacker won:
Outnumbered: 57%
3-to-1 or better: 71%
Caught the defender by surprise: 79%
Outnumbered attackers still won more than half the time. Surprise beat tripling the force.
Life runs on the same math. You cant outspend a bigger firm, another bidder or an incumbent. But you can show up where they’re not looking.
Jam the proposal before anyone asks for it, hit a target a week before the deadline, these are intangible skills the rest of the pack is ignoring.
Watching football today and it's the same lesson every week:
The most talented team doesn't always win.
The team that makes the other side play its game usually does.
Work. Negotiations. Family arguments.
Same rule.
Talent gets you on the field.
Setting the terms wins it.
There’s a limit to the duty you can perform before you need a break. The problem is, you don’t really know the limit and you often can’t know when you’ll get a break. Duty spills into our personal lives so often and we don’t realize it.
The kids birthday parties. Holiday parties and gatherings. It can be exhausting. Yet these are unavoidable. Yes, you have a choice over everything you do. But these obligations have real pull.
What I’ve learned over time is to simply hold on until that next true break comes.
Sometimes it’s just about marching and holding mentally strong.
Rest and retreat will come.
Pro tip:
Don’t turn the lights off in the bathroom when your boss is in there.
I know how my guys sound when they walk. That’s how well I know my team.
Payback’s coming.
Systems and analysis matter.
In early 1968, Navy fighter crews over North Vietnam shot down 9 MiGs and lost 10 aircraft to MiGs doing it. Four years later, flying largely the same jet, they were trading about 12 to 1. The fix wasn't a better plane. It was a better system.
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