Category: Geopolitics

  • What subjects do politicians and military leaders study in order to formulate and implement grand strategies for their countries and the world?

    TLDR: Grand Strategy is not only where military strategy meets statecraft. Grand strategy is understanding everything about a nation and it’s place in the world. Agriculture, business, water, energy, weather, people, religion, pop culture, internal and external politics, risks, threats, infrastructure and foreign deals at all levels. Grand Strategists have to understand how all those moving…

  • Why is it that governments (or large organizations) rarely do anything intelligent?

    This is a strategic exercise in understanding how large groups of people operate. TLDR: You try getting a large group of people to agree on anything while trying to figure out how to pay for it while keeping them all out of trouble. If you can get three strangers to agree on Pizza toppings I’ll…

  • Is the US uninvadable?

    So kids, this is something I killed a morning  with on Quora back in April – an excuse to write about a scenario I’ve obviously been thinking about for a long time.  After a few months it’s at 161,500 views, so I figure it’s worth sharing on my blog that gets a handful of hits…

  • Can Bruce Bueno de Mesquita predict the future?

    So here’s one I first took on in Quora, and it’s a fun topic – Can Bruce Bueno de Mesquita predict the future? NYU Professor BBdM claims to predict international policy events with >90% accuracy in his book “The predictioneers game”. It seems grotesque, now we have a paper where he descibes his method. Can…

  • The Difference Between Intelligence and Espionage

    An out­side the box strate­gic dis­cus­sion by Ted S Galpin The Dif­fer­ence Between Intel­li­gence and Espi­onage. Is a mat­ter of life and death. (2016 Bonus answer – because this article gets a ton of traffic – here’s the direct answer: Intelligence is information gathering. Espionage is illegal.  When you break the law to obtain information…

  • In Afghanistan, there are no coin­ci­dences

    In Afghanistan, there are no coin­ci­dences. An out­side the box strat­egy analy­sis by Ted S Galpin. Reprint from July 2nd, 2010 This week we’ll talk about Afghanistan, mainly because cur­rent events make it too fun not to.  Last week I orig­i­nally started doing a detail ref­er­enced the­sis on Afghanistan, but  real­ized that Strat­for has already done that, so…