This one from NATO’s military boss, General Alexus Grynkewich. In responding to the Russian threat to Europe, he made this remark:

NATO could “match any enemy move up the escalation ladder….”

What about, instead, getting out in front (get higher, to stick to the metaphor) in the escalation sequence and by being in front—escalating farther and faster than Russia can respond—block any further escalatory efforts by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin? Surely American military leadership learned the blood-soaked folly of tit-for-tat reactive moves, which only extend the conflict and greatly increase the friendly casualty butcher’s bill.

He had this, too:

Grynkewich laid out a “block, blunt, and break” strategy for defeating an invading force. The alliance’s superior data and sensing ability means Mr Putin wouldn’t have the luxury of surprising the West.

This is incredibly naïve for so senior a military officer. I was stationed in West Germany at the height of the Cold War, and one of things that we worried about and tried to train against was the ability of Spetznatz to infiltrate and lie low until the USSR decided to come over the fence. At that point, those infiltrated and secreted agents and small teams—4-5 agents—would act to sabotage key communications and radar nodes, interfere with Army crashout ops, blow or at least damage key bridges, and so on.

Today, the ability of Russia’s modern-day and evolved Special Operations units to infiltrate and secrete extends much farther than human agents. It includes smuggled-in and hidden until The Day drones (of which Ukraine has already demonstrated the catastrophic consequences) and malware inserted into key communications nodes and fuel, water, and electricity distribution infrastructure chokepoints not doing anything until activated on The Day.

Russia already is collecting a plethora of intelligence with its campaign of drone incursions and cyberattacks, which, far from being intimidation or warning moves, are in their essence reconnaissance probes.

Our B-1s and B-52s have been redeployed Stateside (cynics might term the transfer a retrograde movement, but they’d be overstating the case) from RAF Fairford after the recent intercepted terrorist attack attempt.

My own not very humble take on that is this. Fairford has no bunkers for protecting aircraft based there; the aircraft are just parked out in the open for anyone with a long gun to take potshots at should the notion strike. The UK government’s apparent disdain for restraining terrorist wannabes—the terrorists were out on bail within hours of their arrests—emphasizes that exposure. Our bombers had no business being there for any reason other than a maintenance problem that prevented an individual bomber from reaching a serious air base.

Diego Garcia, on the other hand, is the same distance from Tehran as is Fairford. It has the same lack of bunkers, but it’s much harder for terrorists to approach.

Deployment to Diego Garcia has an additional benefit: getting there, and back at the end of a deployment, enables a number of aerial refueling squares to be filled.

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.