SecDef Pete Hegseth spoke to his troops the other day, and the WSJ‘s editors remarked on it at some length. Among their remarks was this, toward the end of their piece.

The US military is weathering a one-two punch: a major evolution in battlefield technology coinciding with a nadir in conventional forces as Reagan-era equipment retires. Meanwhile, the US must deter two nuclear peer adversaries (China and Russia) as well as deal with their lesser partners in Iran and North Korea.

One-two punches often precede a knockout blow and the end of a fight, or a nation (for an example of the latter, see Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Poland). The one the US faces, though, can work out extremely favorably for us.

Were our military flush while the technology rollover proceeds apace, political inertia, along with legally committed spending and longer term contracts would strongly militate [sic] against changing course and switching over to greater emphasis on those emerging technologies of immediate and longer-term use on the battlefield, in any upcoming war, and in diplomatic and military efforts to shape the battlefield and the post-battle diplomatic arena.

However, with our military at its current nadir and defense spending similarly reduced, a golden opportunity to shift our military equipage, manpower training, and our fighting (and diplomatic) tactics, strategy, and doctrine to better meet the developing current and future conflict environments has presented itself. With limited funding, there’s less inertia to continue business as usual in acquisition and training for our military components. The ability to shift to those more productive efforts is made commensurately easier.

The one-two punch that confronts us today truly is a crisis. The People’s Republic of China—one of those nuclear peer adversaries—understands the nature of crises: its word for the term is a two-ideogram construct consisting of the ideograms for Danger and Opportunity. The present one-two punch is one of those crises for us.

Iran’s terrorist satrap Houthis have seized a critical island in the Red Sea allowing them—and so Iran—to control traffic through the Red Sea. Matthew Continentti, who should know better, thinks the appropriate response by the Trump administration includes

bring[ing] the Saudis, Israelis, and Emiratis together to prevent the Houthis from consolidating their position.

Stern finger-wagging and harsh words by this coalition won’t accomplish anything beyond emphasizing the perception of Iran’s opponents as paper kittens.

What really needs to be done is to get Saudi Arabia and Jordan—which has as much interest in a free-sailing Red Sea as the Saudis and Emiratis—to commit their ground troops, under American air cover, to run the Houthis back off that island. That’s the only “prevent them from consolidating” that has any value.

The parallel step—not “next step” as Continetti characterizes it—is to allow[] the US military to finish its target list from Operation Epic Fury, adding if missing from that target list communications networks, transportation hubs, state institutions, and symbols of the regime.

Half measures not only don’t cut it, they run up costs in friendly treasure and blood. And that’s immoral as well as politically stupid.

Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine is advising/warning of the need for the US to be prepared to fight in the region of the moon.

At a conference at the Air and Space Forces Association, Caine said that

American troops need to prepare for combat not only in Earth’s orbit but around the moon….

And that

the US military should adapt now so it “is prepared to fight, endure, and win…from the seabed to cislunar space.

That’s good, but it doesn’t go far enough. We need to be able to fight and win on the surface of the moon, also, and we need to seize the even higher ground of the Martian surface and the volume of space around it, which includes Mars’ moons and their potential for to serve as bases and launchers.

The region around the moon must also include—and we must explicitly seize for our exclusive military use—the Lagrange points of the Earth-moon system. These points are areas well separated spatially from the moon where the gravitational forces of Earth and the moon are balanced so that objects can sit there stably without needing to expend energy to remain in place.

The Earth-moon Lagrange points include two in the moon’s orbit roughly 60 degrees in front of and behind the moon, a third just beyond the moon on the Earth-moon line, a fourth on the same line but between the moon and Earth, and a fifth on the same line but on the far side of Earth from the moon.

Those Lagrange points, as stable as they are, also are important economically since refiners and factories would be stable there.

One more item: communication lags between Earth and the moon, and especially between Earth and Mars, are such that real time, active control from Earth of our defensive systems there would be impractical. That puts a premium on active, military-tailored AI being in place to exercise tactical and immediate control over our systems there within strategic parameters transmitted to them from DoD here on the ground. That puts a premium on putting a low lid on efforts to overregulate AI innovations.