SWJ Community of Interest & Practice - Irregular Warfare & Related Issues, National Defense & Foreign Policy. RT/Like ≠ Endorsement.
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Service leaves a mark on families, communities, and the institutions raised to meet that need.
It lives on in the quiet work that follows: the mentor who helps a veteran find a path, the organization that walks with a family through difficulties or loss, the peer who sits with someone in the dark and stays, & the ones who listen, learn, and support.
Those stories matter.
They deserve to be told with care.
Small Wars Journal is inviting essays for "Service, Sacrifice, and Impact: SWJ Veterans Day Essay Showcase 2026."
We want writing that honors real lives and the real organizations standing beside them.
Selected essays will be published in Small Wars Journal during the week of Veterans Day 2026. Each published piece will recognize the charity or nonprofit at the heart of the essay. The showcase will also mark the second anniversary of SWJ’s relaunch. There is no prize money. The purpose of selection is publication, visibility, and recognition.
The showcase will also mark the second anniversary of SWJ’s relaunch. We welcome veterans, family members, caregivers, nonprofit leaders, volunteers, researchers, and anyone who has seen this work up close. Tell a story that is true.
Show what an organization actually does. Give readers insight. You might write about:
◾ A life changed by charitable or community support
◾The passage from military service to civilian purpose
◾Mental health, moral injury, recovery, and family resilience
◾Care for the ill or injured
◾Jobs, education, mentorship, and leadership after service
◾Gold Star and military families, & those who care for them
◾What it takes to build, lead, or sustain a veterans nonprofit
◾How veterans keep serving their communities
Essays are due October 11, 2026.
Please follow the guidance on our Submit Your Work page, and set the subject line to “SWJ Veterans Day Showcase 2026”.
Thank you for your service and support. 🇺🇸 SWJ is ran by veterans, military family members, and supporters of veterans; we hope to host more essays in the near future.
Learn more here: smallwarsjournal.com/veteran…
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Small Wars Journal retweeted
Check out my new piece, "Centauri, High Valyrian, and Klingon: Why Advanced Encryption Standards Cannot Replace Low-Density Human Dialects," featured on @smallwars
smallwarsjournal.com/2026/09…
P.S. Can you guess I'm a HUGE nerd for Babylon 5?
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Modern command and control depends on secure communications, yet digital systems remain vulnerable to electronic warfare, signal intelligence, cyber exploitation, and infrastructure disruption. 🌐
Catherine Abbott of SWJ (@cmawd7) argues that revitalizing low-density Indigenous languages as a contingency communications capability would provide commanders with an additional layer of operational security when encrypted digital networks cannot be trusted.
Her proposal revisits the legacy of the Navajo Code Talkers through the lens of contemporary conflict.
📖Read "Centauri, High Valyrian, and Klingon: Why Advanced Encryption Standards Cannot Replace Low-Density Human Dialects, a #SWJPerspectivePiece
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Abstract
The United States’ heavy reliance on digital Communications Security (COMSEC) introduces critical vulnerabilities to near-peer exploitation, risking total loss of operational advantage and battlefield devastation. If digital encryption and technical systems fail, the U.S. may rely on analog alternatives, including low-density linguist capabilities, to maintain secure tactical voice command and control on contested battlefields.
Given the near loss of Navajo Code Talker linguistic capabilities and an overwhelmingly monolingual population, the U.S. faces a severe strategic deficit compared with adversarial states that may leverage their own endangered regional dialects.
As a contingency, the U.S. linguistic security apparatus must revitalize endangered regional language isolates as a layered security measure to ensure operational security if COMSEC fails in a modern digitally contested battlefield.
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Small Wars Journal retweeted
"The warfighter is no longer simply using equipment. The equipment is experienced as an extension of self. "
The Warfighter-Cyborg Problem: How stacked wearable technologies may reshape identity, judgement, and battlefield ethics | @smallwars
smallwarsjournal.com/2026/09…
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Small Wars Journal retweeted
This is one of the major problems I ran into with my 2020 PhD dissertation @smallwars.
This is why the @UNSWCanberra program led by Professor David Kilcullen is so helpful - it bridges the theory-practice divide (for civilians).
bridges.monash.edu/articles/…
unsw.academia.edu/AlexBurns/…
"The theorist is rewarded for a distinction that reads well; the practitioner is punished for one that does not survive contact with reality.
A theorist can build an entire architecture on a category that has never once been operationalized and lose nothing.
A practitioner who mistakes a label for a lever loses the operation.
This also explains why the field’s most elaborate taxonomies are often produced by those observing operations rather than conducting them.
For the observer, classification appears to be the work because it is the most visible part of the work.
For the practitioner, however, classification is only a means to an end.
What ultimately matters is not whether a mechanism has been named, but whether it can be anticipated, shaped, or exploited."
-Oriane Cohen in "Naming is Not Knowing: Why #CognitiveWarfare Studies Need a Methodological Reset," a #SWJEssay
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Rania Kisar examines #Iran through the institutions and capabilities that sustain its regional influence. 🇮🇷🕸️
She analyzes decades of confrontation, regional security, freedom of navigation, proxy organizations, and missile forces using Arabic-language commentary from across #theGulf.
The result is a settlement framework that emphasizes verification, accountability, maritime security, and enforceable limits on the mechanisms that enable coercion.
📖Read "The System, Not the Centrifuges," a #SWJEssay
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Abstract
Forty-seven years after Iranian students stormed the US Embassy in #Tehran, the confrontation that began there has never ended. It has only changed shape. Hostages became roadside bombs. Roadside bombs became proxies. Proxies became drones, cyber intrusions into American water systems, and a nuclear program that moved within weeks of producing enough fissile material for a weapon.
Now, as mediators seek to restore a ceasefire and reopen the #StraitofHormuz, a narrow chokepoint carrying roughly one-quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade, the United States faces a challenge that neither diplomacy nor military force can resolve alone: whether any settlement will dismantle Iran’s broader coercive system or merely pause the conflict while preserving the means to renew it.
This essay brings readers the voices of analysts Washington rarely hears in full, drawn from states enduring Iranian missile and drone attacks, maritime coercion, and the economic damage imposed on communities dependent on regional trade. They diverge over how Iran should be confronted, but converge on why its coercive system cannot be restored. Their perspectives illuminate the region’s layered strategic puzzle and lead to a stark warning and a practical test for any settlement: if Iran retains its missiles, militias, and maritime leverage, the war will not have ended. Such a settlement will only schedule the next one, and America’s partners will pay first, but not alone.
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"The theorist is rewarded for a distinction that reads well; the practitioner is punished for one that does not survive contact with reality.
A theorist can build an entire architecture on a category that has never once been operationalized and lose nothing.
A practitioner who mistakes a label for a lever loses the operation.
This also explains why the field’s most elaborate taxonomies are often produced by those observing operations rather than conducting them.
For the observer, classification appears to be the work because it is the most visible part of the work.
For the practitioner, however, classification is only a means to an end.
What ultimately matters is not whether a mechanism has been named, but whether it can be anticipated, shaped, or exploited."
-Oriane Cohen in "Naming is Not Knowing: Why #CognitiveWarfare Studies Need a Methodological Reset," a #SWJEssay
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"The study of cognitive warfare has entered a period of remarkable conceptual productivity. New frameworks, new taxonomies, and new categories continue to emerge, each seeking to capture a previously overlooked dimension of conflict.
Increasingly, however, the field also appears willing to entertain concepts that are highly speculative, only loosely connected to observable mechanisms, and whose explanatory necessity remains uncertain. The recent appearance of alchemic warfare in a this journal is therefore less interesting in itself than what it reveals about the intellectual trajectory of the field.
Every mature discipline develops new terminology. New technologies and new forms of conflict require new analytical tools, and without conceptual innovation, strategic thought would stagnate. The difficulty begins only when the production of concepts starts to outpace the production of understanding.
Over the past decade the literature around cognitive warfare has undergone an extraordinary expansion of vocabulary: cognitive warfare, narrative warfare, epistemic warfare, cognitive maneuver, cognitive security, reflexive control, information confrontation, sense-making, meaning-making, memetic warfare and numerous other conceptual refinements.
Each promises to reveal a previously overlooked dimension of conflict. Each proposes a new framework, a new taxonomy, a new lens. Yet it is far from obvious that the field understands its object any better than it did five years ago.
That paradox is the subject of this essay."
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🗞🇺🇸🇰🇷 🇰🇵Here is the September 20, 2026 Edition of the National Security and Korean News + Expert Commentary by our Editor-at-Large, Col. (R) David Maxwell! 🗞
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Find our daily news everyday on our website or subscribe via these links to have the news sent straight to you!📬 ㅤ
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💭Quotes of the day:
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"One of the first institutions to be attacked by tyrants, whether they be dictators of the left or the right, is the press."
– Ronald Reagan
"If your identity can be inflated by praise, it can be shattered by criticism. Neither deserves that authority."
– Epictetus
"Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it."
– Mary Oliver
📰National Security News: upi.com/Korea-Regional-Revie…
1. Trump says planned arch will be ‘military complex’ for drones, snipers
2. Trump Announces an ‘AI Force’ After Industry Sounded Alarm
3. US weighs delaying Taiwan arms sales until after Apec and G20 summits
4. US, China trade teams set to huddle in New York on tariffs, AI and Iran
5. TRANSCRIPT: ‘China Retains Levers for Long-Term Territorial Ambitions’
6. Trump-Xi Summit Unlikely to Yield Taiwan Agreement, Former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Said
7. China’s A.I. Makes a Great Leap Forward. But Its Economy Is Falling Behind.
8. Refineries Are Now the Main Chokepoint for Global Energy Supplies
9. The Rise of A.I. Is Raising Threats From Drones, Police Group Warns
10. Upgunning the A-Team: How Special Operations Command Is Adding Cyber and Electronic-Warfare Capabilities
11. USMC Used Its Expeditionary Operations Playbook In Combat For First Time During Epic Fury
12. Artificial Superintelligence: U.S. Strategy for an Uncertain Future
13. How OSINT Can Help the US IC Crack Chinese Leadership’s Code
14. The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced From the Facts
15. Five reasons why Trump was so desperate to take control of Greenland
16. US Allies Will Be Watching Xi Jinping’s Washington Visit Closely
17. China expert warns Beijing wants Americans — not the CCP — to spread its message
18. When America Falls Silent: The Strategic Costs of Dismantling VOA
📰Korean News: upi.com/Korea-Regional-Revie…
1. N. Korea fires 1 short-range ballistic missile toward East Sea: S. Korean military
2 N. Korea fires additional projectile after short-range ballistic missile launch: S. Korean military
3. Is Korea still a shrimp between whales?
4. [INTERVIEW] ‘My Hell Could Not Kill Me’: A defector’s journey from home and back
5. Editorial: How Can We Speak of Unification When We Can’t Even Build a Single School for North Korean Defector Youth?
6. What’s Behind Seoul’s Olive Branch to Pyongyang?
7. Heavy truck spotted on unopened Yalu River bridge, stokes rumors of opening
8. Unification ministry plans to send over 1,400 medical items to Pyongyang hospital
9. South Korea Respects Court Ruling Ordering North Korea Compensation
10. Wrong Korea, wrong anthem: Asian Games organizers apologize to S. Korea
11. Gov’t to brief Nat’l Assembly on 1st U.S.-bound investment project under summit deal
12. Seoul, Washington strike different tones after brief meeting of top diplomats
13. Korea, U.S. must compromise after inconclusive talks
9/20/26 National Security and Korean News and Commentary
smallwarsjournal.com/2026/09…
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🗞🇺🇸🇰🇷 🇰🇵Here is the September 19, 2026 Edition of the National Security and Korean News + Expert Commentary by our Editor-at-Large, Col. (R) David Maxwell! 🗞
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Find our daily news everyday on our website or subscribe via these links to have the news sent straight to you!📬 ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ ㅤ ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ ㅤㅤㅤ ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ
💭Quotes of the day:
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"If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done."
– Vincent Van Gogh
"I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be."
– Charles Dickens
"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."
– Bertrand Russell
📰National Security News: upi.com/Korea-Regional-Revie…
1. Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say
2. I Planned Military Ops. AI Just Made It My Most Valuable Skill | Opinion
3. Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School
4. Pentagon official’s ‘contemptuous’ briefing sparks bipartisan ire
5. Rare honour: Trump will greet Xi at Joint Base Andrews, not just White House
6. Iran and China Create First-of-Their-Kind Autonomous A.I. Influence Campaigns
7. Will Taiwan Fight? We Need Better Evidence.
8. US Allies Are Removing Their Nation’s Assets from U.S. Soil
9. Xi Jinping Skipped One Dinner—and Sparked a Flurry of Questions About His Health
10. Opinion | The AI danger that matters most? Falling behind China.
11. Opinion | America needs to destroy what really sustains the Iranian regime
12. Opinion | You Probably Have the Iran War Backward
13. Generals Need to Answer the Hard Questions
14. Russia Demanded Japan Remove U.S. Typhon Missile Systems
15. U.S. Reaches Greenland Security Agreement
16. Niall Ferguson: Is Peace at Hand in Ukraine?
17. How a ‘Vampire’ Could Solve the US Navy’s Drone Woes
18. An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing ‘Cognitive Surrender.’ Universities Are in a Bind.
19. Hegseth Made the Fitness Test Harder for Women in Combat Roles. Most Female Marines Are Passing
📰Korean News: upi.com/Korea-Regional-Revie…
1. Joint Press Statement for the 29th Korea-U.S. Integrated Defense Dialogue
2. S. Korea, U.S. vow to strengthen cooperation to accelerate wartime OPCON transition in defense talks
3. Cheong Wa Dae says Lee’s ‘no war intervention’ remark not a rejection of Trump’s Hormuz request
4. Cho, Rubio agree to work together for ‘good’ results from talks on investment projects in U.S.
5. Russia-North Korea Relations: An Expanding Partnership – Analysis
6. Will Russian Drones Show Up in North Korea?
7. Trump Courts North Korea’s Leader, but Might Need China to Reignite the Flame
8. N. Korea rejects IAEA resolution, vows to maintain nuclear force amid U.S. threats
9. N.K. leader calls for ‘most concentrated and destructive’ artillery capability
10. Scholar calls academy integration key to South Korea’s future military
11. K-defense exports enter new phase
12. ‘The Cherry Orchard’ Review: Chekhov Speaks Korean
13. To Succeed in AI, South Korea Is Reinventing Its Developmental State Model
14. AI era puts philosophy in demand at Korea’s top universities
9/19/26 National Security and Korean News and Commentary
smallwarsjournal.com/2026/09…
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🗞🇺🇸🇰🇷 🇰🇵Here is the September 18, 2026 Edition of the National Security and Korean News + Expert Commentary by our Editor-at-Large, Col. (R) David Maxwell! 🗞
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Find our daily news everyday on our website or subscribe via these links to have the news sent straight to you!📬 ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ ㅤ ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ ㅤㅤㅤ ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ
💭Quotes of the day:
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"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."
– Horace Mann
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"It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell."
– Buddha
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Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.
– Miyamoto Musashi
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📰National Security News: upi.com/Korea-Regional-Revie…
1. Why Al-Qaeda Is Bringing Hamza bin Laden Back
2. Why Eurasia, Not the Indo-Pacific, Matters Most in Next Phase of Taiwan Deterrence
3. America’s Attrition Trap: The U.S. Military Needs to Build Up Its Endurance by Nadia Schadlow
4. By Nearly Every Metric, the U.S. Is Losing the Iran War
5. Trump Claims US Army Base in Poland Closer, Site Announcement to Come ‘Very Soon’
6. How to Understand the New Age of War: A Conversation With Lawrence D. Freedman
7. String of daring Russian plots is testing Washington’s restraint
8. The U.S. and China Want AI Guardrails. But Their Ideas Couldn’t Be More Different.
9. The US Military Is on an AI Sprint. Its Accountability Mechanisms Are Still in the Starting Blocks.
10. To Deter China from Invading Taiwan, Trump Must Exploit Beijing’s Pressure Points
11. U.S. Strike on Iranian School May Have Been War Crime, U.N. Report Says
12. Trump’s Pentagon weighs pulling up to 40,000 US troops from Europe in major drawdown plan
13. Army has enough drones for each unit, now it needs to train soldiers to use them
14. U.S. Intelligence Warns of China Theft Over Sale of F-35 Jets to Saudis
15. The American Age Is Over: A period of global dominance has ended in plain sight.
16. Claiming the Kill: Attribution and False-Flagging in Cyber Offense
17. An Army General Talks Fusing Sensors and Shooters on the Eastern Flank
18. China, Not Iran, Is Trump’s Real Foreign-Policy Debacle
19. The Checklist Tax: The First Problem for AI in the US Army
20. Why Trump and Xi Finally Agree on AI
21. ‘You’re Eroding Trust’: What Trump Shifting Tens of Millions in Military Aid Means for U.S. Alliances
22. Debris Found in Yemen Suggests Saudi Arabia Fired Its First Chinese Missile
23. Iran war is draining US military resources from Pacific and Asia
📰Korean News: upi.com/Korea-Regional-Revie…
1. Conditions not a calendar: the reality of ROK/U.S. OPCON transition
2. Rejecting Trump, South Korean Leader Says He Will Not Send Troops to Iran
3. A new Trump-Kim summit would be a nightmare for everyone but Pyongyang
4. N Korea cites buildup for nuclear stance
5. North Korea Sends Women to Russian Factories in Line of Ukrainian Fire
6. Area near North Korean nuclear site has experienced nearly 1,400 quakes
7. The Long Arm of China and North Korea’s Repression
8. South Korea Launches K-Silk Road Initiative at First Central Asia Summit
9. Nuri rocket launch heralds South Korea’s first microsatellite constallation — and shows it might have the technology to launch its own Starlink
10. South Korea’s Lee rules out military role in Middle East conflict
11. U.S. ambassador says S. Korea-U.S. alliance ‘linchpin’ of peace on Korean Peninsula
12. N.K. leader’s sister slams U.S.-led maritime drill, vows nuclear build-up
13. South Korea will continue to help ‘create an opening’ for Trump-Kim summit: Lee
14. Defector urges outside information for North Korea
15. South Korea’s unification education is asking the wrong question about peace
9/18/26 National Security and Korean News and Commentary smallwarsjournal.com/2026/09…
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AI access becomes a national security issue when compute is scarce and the decision window is short. ⏳
“The governor facing a Category 5 hurricane or the CEO facing a cyber intrusion only has a few hours in which AI tools can actually make a difference. Once the decision window has passed, availability of the models is beside the point.”
This piece argues for a strategic token reserve that includes priority access to frontier AI capacity for government, critical infrastructure, and other essential users during a crisis. ⚡️💧
📖Read Allocating AI Priority: A Strategic Token Reserve?
a #SWJEssay By Terence Check, currently the Deputy Chief Counsel (A) at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and is a non-resident fellow at the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Institute for Future Conflict.
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Abstract:
The current artificial intelligence market lacks a way to distinguish and prioritize strategically-beneficial uses of leading AI models. In times of war and crisis, adversaries could clog the queue of user requests, leading to delays in decision making and other suboptimal outcomes. To better manage AI resources, a priority rating scheme or a “strategic token reserve” does have prior legal precedent and could provide a way to better manage these risks.
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The #CCP claims one-party rule is the only authentic expression of Chinese culture. 🇨🇳
#Taiwan’s vibrant democracy dismantles this strategic narrative. 🇹🇼
History reveals a long-standing impulse toward representative governance.
The 1898 Hundred Days Reform and Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People demonstrate this legacy.
Taiwan preserves Chinese heritage while sustaining world-class democratic institutions. 📚
Defending Taiwan secures the principle of political choice. Democratic governance remains a viable future for Chinese civilization. 🤝
📖Read "Chinese Culture Is Not the Obstacle: Taiwan, Democracy, and the CCP’s Narrative War," By General Russell D. Howard
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"For decades, a persistent argument in China studies has held that democracy is fundamentally incompatible with Chinese civilization. China, this argument suggests, has always valued hierarchy over equality, order over political competition, and centralized authority over individual political rights. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has eagerly embraced this interpretation of history, arguing that one-party rule is not merely a contemporary political choice, but the natural, immutable expression of Chinese culture.
This argument deserves closer examination."
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