The Army Wants You to Write. Three Soldiers Explain Why
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You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. This episode is brought to you by OneBrief. OneBrief replaces underperforming legacy tools like the dreaded PowerPoint and drives military planning and other workflows into the future. Built by military veterans, OneBrief's tools are intuitive, easy to use, collaborative, AI-ready, and interoperable. Find out more at warontherocks.com slash OneBrief.

Now, in this episode, I speak to three soldiers who are behind an important Army effort to power writing throughout the service. I hope you enjoy the episode. My name is Sergeant First Class Leighton Summerlin. I'm an infantryman in platoon sergeant by trade in the 173rd.

Hey, Ryan. Thanks for having us. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Zach Griffiths. I'm a career special forces officer, mostly with 10th Special Forces Group. So happy to be here. Major Emily Lopez. I'm a civil affairs officer coming from the 92nd Civil Affairs Battalion and 4th Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group, UCOM aligned. And you all play an integral role in something called the Harding Project. What is that?

The Harding Project is an initiative to renew professional writing in the United States Army. Chief of Staff of the Army Randy George, Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Wymer want to get more folks back writing in our professional journals and renewing this professional discourse that is so important to winning wars in the future.

And how did you all get involved in this? 18 months ago now, I published an article called Bring Back Branch Magazines. And this was kind of the culmination of a couple of years of work. I had been frustrated with my branch magazine that Emily now runs, Special Warfare, back in 2019 when they didn't publish an article of mine. And I did some digging and I realized kind of the army had a problem with its journals and they weren't as dynamic and vibrant. They were publishing less content less often and more radically. So I done some digging and I collected a bunch of data and

And ultimately that article led to a meeting with General George and General George said, "Hey, you know, as part of my strengthening the Army profession focus area, we need to take action and renew these journals." Last year I was a platoon sergeant in the 173rd and I had recently published an article that was the capstone of my time as the drill sergeant of the year for EMCO. Fast forward a couple months while I was in Vicenza,

had a lot going on. And then when I was rigging up this Lieutenant for a jump, I get a phone call from some DC number that I almost didn't answer. And it turns out it was then Major Griffiths. And he said that they were standing up this project to renew professional writing in the military. And he asked me if I want to be a part of it. So that's how I joined the team. What he said was, am I in trouble? Yes. And then he said, he told me if I had said yes, he was just going to hang up the phone and go about his day. He wasn't in trouble. We were stoked to, uh,

Because normally you wouldn't hear from someone like Zach if... Right. Yeah. So he... Says something about the army though, doesn't it? He says, hey, this is Major So-and-So from the Chief of Staff's office. Do you have a minute? And like I said, I had a lot going on at the time and I was like, am I in trouble? He says, no, it's a good thing. I was like, okay, well, yeah, sure. Like I got all the time in the world. Yeah.

So no kidding, there I was about a week out from graduation at the National Defense University at Fort Liberty. And I got a call asking if I would be a Harding Fellow. It wasn't really asking, it was more so telling me, hey, you have been nominated for this position. And I started two weeks later.

What were you doing before that? So before that I was at 10th group working as a battalion civil affairs planner with them. It's actually the battalion I'm going to command next summer. So like we have this sort of weird connection through the army. Why did you join the army? I've always wanted to be a soldier. My dad was in the army. I've got a huge military family on my dad's side.

Even though I didn't live with him when I was younger, he lived in Germany for a long time. He was like this GI Joe. It's always been in my family. I think it runs in our blood. It goes back to the Alamo, which is kind of a cool little story. But yeah, I just always wanted to. So blessed to do what I love and call it work. And you joined right when you were 18 or?

Yeah, yeah, straight out of high school. What was your first job in the Army? I was technically an anti-tank guided missile platform, or striker platform gunner, but we deployed like a month out of basic training, and we didn't take those, so we were light. So you didn't get that specialized training, yeah. No, no, no, we didn't take our strikers, we were dismounted the whole time, so I was a rifleman pretty much. RC South, Zabal Province, bounced around between there and...

like north of the arkansas when was that first deployment it was uh 2012. and why did you join the army i was a junior in high school and i remember the national guard came and did a big retention recruiting event

And they had asked people, "Hey, whoever can do the most push-ups will win a t-shirt, and then you'll get a meeting with us in our office." See, they already would have lost me to that. I would have been like, "I'm outta here." Clearly, I was delusional, and I went up there and competed against the whole football team. I end up winning. I get this shirt, and I go home and I tell my mom, like, "I'm joining the Army." And this was my sophomore year of college, and she was like, "Yeah, okay. No, you're not." I pushed it for the next year. I had told all my teachers.

I think it was a way for me to escape in a way, small town Arkansas, and it felt like I would be able to travel and experience the world in a different way. You know, right. I saw a path in my life where I was just going to work in an office. My friends from high school, you know, we're going to college, they're going to become lawyers and do, and I was like, that's not for me. You know, I want to get out and I want to do other stuff. I have done that, but the joke is on me that as an officer, like I primarily work in an office. Yeah.

Now I definitely don't even have a window. Inside cats. Well, when did you decide? What was the moment where you decided to join? I don't know there's an exact moment. I was a Boy Scout for a long time and I attribute kind of my experience leading, being outside to kind of the decision. I remember sitting in the car with my parents one day and they said like, what are you thinking about college? And I was like, I want to go to West Point. And they actually said, I don't believe you. We're going to take you to West Point because I grew up in Massachusetts. It's only five hours away. So as a junior, I did a day there. I think my parents thought that's it. You know, he's going to see

C-Sense and just go to college. What time of year was it? I think this was like in March or something. It's not a beautiful time to be at West Point. That's why I left. But I left and I was like, yeah, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to West Point. And to their credit, they offered, maybe you should be a forester. When I told them I didn't want to work in an office and I said, that's not it. I

I think I'm going to go to West Point and be an Army officer. You weren't sold on that for even a second. Not even for a second. I was like, I appreciate you thinking for me. And I didn't know what it was, but infantry, I knew what I wanted to do. I did that. I always thought about special operations. So I'm glad to be a special force officer today. And at what point did writing or reading, writing about your profession change?

play an important role in how you saw your profession or your service or the Army? Quick background. In high school, I barely passed, failed junior English twice. I lied and cheated out of every writing and reading assignment I was ever given. Too bad you didn't have chat GPT back then, right? Yeah. Well, I would have used it for all the wrong reasons. Not like how me and Colonel Griffiths advocate today, for sure. I say that because I do wish it had been different now, knowing what I know now.

For myself, it started when I became the drill sergeant of the year for EMCO back in 2021. You know, we did a lot of great work with the guys down there and that was all because of the stuff that I had started reading. And there was one book that was recommended to me in 2020 that I ended up reading and just like opened the floodgates and then

What ended up happening was I created a class that was taught at the installation level. It was co-opted by my CSM at the time. And he challenged me to put it on paper because I did the entire thing on a whiteboard because I didn't like writing. So I hit the grindstone and I got that done. And then I took it to the infantry magazine because I had been introduced to those a couple of years before and I had learned a bunch. And I thought to myself, OK, maybe I can immortalize this. And maybe over the next 20 years, you know, five people will read it.

And that was kind of my path into reading and writing and, you know, that whole self-learning piece. And that article is actually how I found Sergeant Summerlin, to invite him to the Harding Project. And what I loved about it was he specifically called to like start a discourse on like what standards mean in the Army. And so I thought that was like a pretty unique perspective that a lot of folks don't have. And so I appreciate that he took the time to do it.

Yeah, for me, I'll say I didn't particularly love writing growing up through school. I was more of like a science nerd. I've always been a big reader, but it really hit home for me as a civil affairs team leader when you are no longer located with your higher headquarters. You're there for six months, sometimes in a different country. And if you cannot effectively communicate what you're doing on the ground, you're not

you're not advocating for your team and you're potentially not advocating for staying in that country, you know, for a prolonged period of time. My team probably hated me. I was very anal about everything that left our team room because I wanted it to portray as accurately as possible what we were doing on the ground. And then, you know, I got another dose of it, just graduated with my master's degree. And it's the first time that I've been able to take a pause from working and really think about

And I think I gained some confidence in you don't always have to have the first original idea. It's what you do with that body of knowledge that already exists. So that it kind of clicked for me in grad school this past year. You know, I remember finishing my time as a special forces team leader and like feeling like as a professional, like I should contribute, but I didn't know how. And I was like quite nervous even today. I thought of contributing special warfare. I might study like applied math as a cadet. And so I didn't necessarily feel like writing came super easy, but

When I was in grad school, I took a class on political writing. It was just six weeks, but then I felt like I was equipped with the tools to do it. And that kind of got me started. I submitted a couple articles when I was in grad school and then kept going. That's part of the reason why, too, I know that there's folks in the Army who may have the inclination or the aptitude, but just not know how. And so I think part of our education reforms we've done through the Hoarding Project, try to bring some of those folks that are on the shelf into participating because it is super important.

to our profession. Yeah, I was very encouraged when I learned about this effort. Obviously, this is a big part of what makes projects like War on the Rocks work, is service members who are willing to

do something that is actually in a way quite brave is to put themselves out there, especially if you're not, you don't have stars on your shoulders, right? As you're putting yourself out there and making an argument and sometimes an unpopular one and giving people the tools to do that and encouraging them to do that and explaining to them why it's professionally important. I think that that is a noble effort. So I was really, I've been very happy to see this grow.

How have you found explaining to soldiers at all levels why this is actually professionally important? And what are the challenges you've come across in making that argument? You know, we just got done briefing the Maneuver Center of Excellence and we had a bunch of different cohorts. And the point that I always try to make to everybody is that

The Army's journals, you know, whether it's special warfare or infantry, every single one of them serves the same purpose as your personal journal. You have this experience, this idea, this thought, this insight, you write it down, it's clear, then you're able to reflect and either improve or make different decisions or do it again if it was good, you know, whatever it may be. That reflection from the Army journal system perspective, it allows more depth because now I write something and you're able to reflect on my thoughts versus my personal journal where it's just me, right? Yeah.

And so the ultimate goal is that that type of reflection, it helps the Army learn faster and adapt more quickly, you know, given the current pace at which things are changing on the battlefield now. I mean, that is so important because...

it takes about 18 months to change what's being taught in the institutions, you know, and it takes about three years to change what's being written in doctrine. So, you know, all these great lessons learned, all these great insights, all these great ideas that everybody has, the journals are the place to do that. And then that way it can be disseminated out to the entire force more quickly. And then we can all get better that way. You know, Ryan, on the question of challenges, there are definitely some folks that are concerned. They don't know where to start. They're worried about attribution, some of these questions. And so,

Two things that I try and emphasize to them. Like one is that one of the reasons we put Harding fellows at all the journals like Emily is to make sure that like there's like a friendly face that's going to take care of them. Right. They're not going to, they may have think they have an unpopular opinion or something, but they can reach out and Emily's not going to let them publish something.

Or it's going to encourage them to write it in such a way that it's going to make a clear argument that doesn't get them burned badly career-wise. And they will make it clear if that person still really wants to publish something that's really contentious, they'll at least make them understand the risk they're taking.

But I do think people greatly overstate the risk. I published more than 30 articles and the most I get is sort of attaboys or, hey, this is an interesting point. But some of them have been quite critical of even my own community and it hasn't been an issue. And so not that it can't be, but I don't think it's a big problem.

The other thing I wanted to highlight is that we are publishing a special issue of Military Review that's going to be providing the tools for individuals and for units. And so it's got things like how to write an article for people that don't know where to get started, people that want to run unit writing programs. It's got a guide for that. And it's even got a great piece on thoughtful dissent. There was a good exchange between a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Jamerson and Lieutenant John Beagle about kind of career paths that was very public last year, about 18 months ago.

And so he wrote kind of his reflections on that. And he's a successful commander. He's going to go be a brigade commander. General Beagle is, of course, a great leader in the army. And so they really modeled, I think, that respectful dissent. So people, I think, really don't need to be so concerned. And I guess the last point is we are so fortunate in the United States Army to have the ability to speak. You know, that is not the case in so many armies around the world. And it's certainly a superpower that we're able to suggest ideas, get them thought through, and then implement it. Yeah, just to double down on that.

Even in our fellow democracies, it's very difficult. You know, Britain, France, it's very frowned upon actually for officers to make arguments. There are certain publications that are trying to change this, like the Wave Room in the UK and Le Rubicon in France, but it's still the culture in the armed services there really does not support professional writing in the same way that we do here. So we really have something pretty special here.

Yeah, and I'll kind of tag on to what Zach was saying. So I think we've gone around and talked to a few of the professional military education classes. And I think people get really hung up on like, how do I format it?

how do I make sure that it fits your standard? And what we're trying to do is kind of lower the barrier of entry there for them of just saying, hey, submit your idea and we can work with you. We can massage it into what it needs to be. So I think a lot of people are just scared because they don't know, which is why I think the military review being published will be very helpful. And when does that come out? So that should come out in early September. We're sending 18,000 copies across the army. Every battalion and above should get at least a couple of

copies. And will it be available online as well? Of course. And we'll do a massive rollout of which this podcast is part. Great. That's wonderful. Everyone should keep an eye out for that. We'll mention that in the show notes as well.

What are some of the other efforts? So first of all, let's name all these journals. There's 11 of them, right? So let's try to name them all. All right. Yeah, let's see if I can do it. Down at Fort Moore, where we just left, we have Infantry and Armor, Field Artillery and Air Defense Artillery are out at Fort Sill. Army Sustainment is the journal for most, it's kind of a consolidated journal for the Army Sustainment branches. Aviation Digest, Army Communicator, the Military Intelligence Professional Bolton, which has celebrated its 50th year.

Special Warfare, which is Emily's journal, the Army Lawyer, and of course the medical journals down at San Antonio.

Taking a break from this conversation to talk briefly to Grant Demery, the CEO of OneBrief. Grant, what made you start OneBrief? I was in the army. I graduated West Point, went to the 101st, and I was in Liberia involved in some military planning and said this could be so much faster and so much better than it is. I was involved in some other planning a bit later in Iraq and got out of the army to go and try and fix it.

For those listening who don't have an intimate experience with military planning, tell us how important it is to just military day-to-day operations, to everything happening. This isn't some abstract thing. It's a very real thing. Almost every military decision comes from a plan. Large-scale decisions like how are we going to defend Taiwan or small decisions like what should this particular platoon or company or battalion do today, all of them come from military planning.

So, improving military planning is really about fixing military decisions.

And how does OneBrief do it differently? A lot of the mundane work, think making a slide, making an order, making a sync matrix, a lot of that is very automated for you and reuses your data from one place to another place. But the bigger thing we got right was scaling collaboration. So if you have four different echelons from a relatively small headquarters up to a joint task force all working together simultaneously, we're able to synchronize each of their contributions.

Bring me under the hood a little bit. What are some of the novel technology that you've developed in one brief that makes it so special? A lot of what we do with real time, I'm pretty proud

And now back to the conversation.

And what's changing organizationally in terms of how these are running, operating, where they report up to? What's changing as a part of all this? So previously, each of these journals was kind of alone and unafraid. They were managed strictly by their own center of excellence since they were a little bit at the whim of the commander of that unit or just priorities at the time. And so one thing we've done is empower Armory University Press, which is an organization at the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, to kind of be the steward of the system.

And so they're the ones that are looking out. And so Emily can go to dad, who is General Slider at the Special Warfare Center in school, or you can go to mom and lean on Colonel Schmidt at Army History Press if she needs help or like for niche issues, right? If she needs a certain software license, it might be easier to get that through the folks at Fort Leavenworth and through the Special Warfare Center. I've also put the Harding Fellows at each place. The Army really cut out all the uniformed editors. Armor was the last one, I think in 2006 was the last year.

And that just meant that these journals lost their connection with the field. The civilian editorial teams are fantastic, but they just don't have the connection. They don't know what matters most to the people in the field. And so putting those uniformed editors there is really important. And last thing I'd say on that point is that we are just launching what's called the Harding Fellowship, Major General Edwin Forrest Harding Fellowship. And this is a program we're recruiting for until 10 September, where selected post-KD captains, master sergeants, or chief warrant officers for will

will get selected. They'll go to the University of Kansas for a year to get a master's in journalism and mass communication, and then report to their center of excellence to serve as the editor of their journal. We should also give them ILE credit, the intermediate level education. So then once they're done, they'll report to their next unit and continue their army careers. So we took a bunch of changes to make sure the journals have a good system going forward.

And you've been pushing a lot of this on your own little sub stack here. That's played a, so there's been sort of this formal institutional push as well as this informal outside push, which is an interesting one-two punch combination.

As I was thinking about this effort, there's a bunch of stakeholders in the system already. And so what I wanted to do was make sure that we communicated what we were doing to the people in kind of a very organic way. And so the sub stack is we've now reached, I think, about 28,000 unique users and up to 3,700 folks that are subscribers.

So we publish twice a week. We encourage people to follow us at hardingproject.com. And that's where you can stay up to date. But yeah, the idea here is the outreach piece because a lot of these reforms we're doing are kind of like internal and hard to see. But we want people to understand the Army's really taking this seriously and making efforts to change. And a big part of this is making it accessible and making a lot of these journals mobile first and web friendly and all that stuff.

Web first, mobile friendly. I don't know which order that comes in. Yeah, that's the tagline right there. Yeah, absolutely. But you hit it right on the head that the most important part is accessibility. Right now, all of these journals, every one of them being so important, they're so hard to find. The example that I gave over the last couple of days is that if you're trying to find... If I'm a field artillery officer or NCO and I'm trying to find something relevant to what I'm working on now that's fairly recent, such as 2018, it is incredibly difficult to get to. So...

We do have the Line of Departure website coming out that's going to be owned by Army University Press. And it's going to have a bunch of different features that are going to make it easier for that scrolling soldier to get that content in front of them. Everything from being able to listen to an audio version of that article if you don't have the time to sit and read it. Like you said, it's going to be web-first and mobile-friendly. So if you've ever been on, you know, not to bash anybody, and particularly the Army, but some of the Army websites are not mobile-friendly.

That was one of our main focuses here is making sure that we can compete for the attention span of our soldiers and young officers that should be digesting this content. You know, Ryan, and we took kind of direct inspiration from One of the Rocks, right? You know, as we think about what this website should look like, like your display is really nice on the phone. And so that's what we're trying to make sure that you can go to a specific article. It has a link that will work and you can get to it. You can share it and all those things. And, you know, initially the accessibility, I mean, people like Emily are making sure it's quality too.

Yeah, for the line of departure, what I think is so beautiful is when you write in for the Special Warfare Journal or for your branch specific journal, for us, you're kind of constrained by a topic. So right now we're talking about the triad, next edition, medical, and then we're talking innovation and modernization. What if we have ideas that are outside of those parameters? Line of departure is the perfect place for us to then push it forward.

that way and still get the information out there and generate conversation. With all the journals moving to rolling publications now instead of quarterly or annual issues, I see that as a big part of accessibility as well because if the battlefield's changing faster than three months, then I can't wait three months to get the most up-to-date knowledge from my peers. The last thing I'd say about line of departure that I...

think is going to be great and beneficial for the Army is that you're able to cross cut. So I'm an infantryman, but a multi-domain fight, I keep talking to my peers about this, how you got to stop thinking in this linear two-dimensional way. You can't just look at the infantry doctrine anymore. Every time I keep my mic, that targets me. And so I now have a much more vested interest in what's getting published in Army Communicator. General George just recognized an article by Sergeant Major Short

and it was on emissions control and what leaders can do. It was published in Army Communicator. If I wasn't knee deep in the journals, I would have never seen it. Line of departure would feature it on the landing page. And as an infantryman, you know, I'll be able to see that or I'll be able to see the 75th Ranger Regiment, you know, medical lessons learned over the last 20 years of GY. And, you know, there was a lot of great stuff in that one as well that pertains to me.

as an instrument. Something that's come up on the show a lot lately and some conversations I've been having, and there's a school of thought in the army that I've heard expressed a few times that surprisingly that people think we don't actually have that much to learn from what's happening in Ukraine.

because people think that we don't have that much to learn from either the Ukrainian military or the Russian military, and I've heard this expressed by some surprising people, and I think that that's dead wrong. One of the things that we have to learn from what's happening is the sort of action, reaction, and adaptation cycles, and this came up on the most recent episode of the podcast where you look at the cyber adaptation cycles where what Ukraine is putting out, Russia is countering within two weeks or less, same with EW,

a lot of this stuff. And so this just gets to the importance of getting these ideas out there quickly, like you were saying, faster than the speed of doctrine, certainly. - Doctrine, yeah, absolutely. - So soldiers can react.

The chief of the Space Force has this great quote about, you have to be learning these lessons in peacetime because you got to be prepared to learn them in peacetime. So in wartime, you're primed and ready to do it because the pace is just going to increase so much. And that's one of many things I think we need to be learning from that conflict. I mean, Ryan, you know, because I published the article on Battlefield Observers, War on the Rocks, like we're in violent agreement.

I do think the journals are just such a good place and have always been a good place for debating the lessons of these conflicts, right? I think no one should doubt that there are lessons. The question is, which are valid for us? And the journals are the perfect place to have this back and forth and decide which of these lessons are valid and in what way should we apply them. I'd really like to talk about the importance of enlisted and NCO writing, because this is something that

We get these articles submitted to War on the Rocks, although not often enough, although they end up being some of our most read articles when we get them. For example, we had this great article by a senior enlisted Marine that just got so many readers from across the community. And you can also tell sometimes when an article goes viral on War on the Rocks, it's because it breaks beyond the niche and it's a lot of people who wouldn't normally read War on the Rocks. This one went viral because a

a lot of service members who might not normally read an article read the article. And that was the case of this one. And I think one of the advantages you get from enlisted voices is they're closer to ground truth in a lot of ways, and they're closer to these action-reaction cycles. And so how are you all thinking, but of course, especially our NCO here, thinking about getting more enlisted voices out there? I heard somebody mention that there are

so many people in the Army who live a life worth writing about who don't know how to write. And then inversely, there are a small portion of people who know how to write who do not live a life worth writing about, right? And so when I think about the NCO Corps that the Army has, these guys have a life worth writing about. You know, that little bit of inspiration coupled with just a little bit of confidence and tools that, you know, that Emily was talking about just a little bit ago,

That's what I try to communicate to them as far as like, how do you get started and why is it important? Like you said, those are the guys that are closest to the ground. They have the answer. They have that experience at the tactical level, especially on what's going to work and what's not going to work. And so if you can share that with the entire army through a journal, you might've just saved the war. You know, one of the examples that I like to think back to is the Sergeant Cullen hedgerow buster, right? It was this idea that General Bradley found. He found this kid who was a sergeant. He had this idea. It went from the

him to the company commander, to the major, to the colonel, all the way up to General Bradley. And General Bradley goes and finds this guy and they end up putting what was called a rhino on the front of some of the tanks. And that was how they were busting through the hedgerows. And then the rest of the tanks in the infantry would follow through. And that's what they attribute a lot of their success to. And it was because this guy, this guy on the ground had an idea. He was an NCO. Those are the guys that have all those ideas.

One of the things that we're actively doing right now is the SMA just partnered with the NCO Journal. They're going to stand up the Muddy Boots Forum that's going to launch in tandem with the Line of Departure website. And what this is, is all of our senior non-commissioned officers. So we're going to have a lot of nominative CSMs write and kind of set the example. They're going to lead the way and show that you can do it.

Those are the kind of guys that I was talking about in the beginning. They have upwards of like 36 years of experience that we don't want to lose, that we do want to capture so that way we can reflect and learn from. Once Line of Departure launches, you'll see about four articles a month come out in that particular section. And I've been reading some of them so far and there's a lot of great stuff, right? They also kind of have a call to action, right? The call is, hey, respond to this. Write an article for your branch journal, for NCO journal, and get more NCO voices, right? Yeah.

Yeah, so subtle flex. The Special Operations Center of Excellence is actually the only center to nominate two fellows for the Harding Project, an officer and a non-commissioned officer. And why I think that is so powerful, especially in the SOF community,

A lot of the enlisted and the warrant officers, they can stay on the same team. They can stay in the same battalion for their entire career. And by not hearing what they have to say, you're missing out on a lot. You know, I think we say NCOs are the backbone of the Army. It's almost criminal.

that we're not putting more focus on it. And I hope that as Ben and I, my counterpart, go around and talk to the different PMEs that they can see like, okay, I can do this. I do have something to say. And I have a similar question for you. You're a civil affairs officer. A lot of voices within the Army, it's sort of a lot of power and influence in the Army is biased towards the combat arms. How do you think professional writing can make

the non-combat arms heard a bit more. For a lot of the supporting MOSs, non-combat, like you can't move without us. You know, you can't talk without us. You can't shoot without us. So if...

We don't have kind of our system set and in place. And if we aren't sharing those to the wider audience, to the big army, to the other branches, I think we're missing out on a chance to kind of crosstalk in a way. The line of departure might help in this way. As special force officer, infantry officer, I'm never going to read Army sustainment.

But if their most recent article pops in the line of departure website, I'm probably much more likely to read it. I can get into my branch vertical, but if you hit the main page, it's going to show whatever is current and whatever's trending. And so I think that might really help increase just knowledge about what the other branches do and raise those voices up. Yeah. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've gone somewhere and said, I'm a civil affairs officer and people look at me like, what the heck is that? So just putting it out there, what it is that you do and how you fit into the big picture.

I feel like I'm always putting myself in this pure fight mindset where it's like, what am I going to have to do if I find myself in Belarus tomorrow? You know, so I think, you know, reading or seeing something about, you know, the bridging, uh,

What are they called? Oh, engineer bridge operations. Yeah, the bridge operations guys. They're so forgotten about all the time, but at some point that could be very important to me. So I think just opening up that dialogue between the two and cross-cutting between the branches is super important. Layton's comment about Belarus is probably a good time to mention that these soldiers' views do not represent those of the Army, the Defense Department, or anyone in the U.S. government. Yeah.

It's just a notional. Sorry about that. The point about bridging, though. We'll keep it in because it's funny. Some people do ask Ryan. They're like, hey, War on the Rocks is doing super well. The Modern War is too. They've got tons of followers. Why should we bother with the Army's branch journals? And so I just want to say, the reason I talk about engineer bridging operations is because I'd say that you have no articles on engineer bridging operations. I think you say you have one article on wet gap crossings at War on the Rocks.

Modern War Institute's the same thing. These have big platforms, but engineers need a place to talk about engineer issues. And if you look at back issues of engineer, like wet gap crossing and bridging is a rich topic. And in infantry, these niche branch issues about employment of machine guns, employment of mortars,

field craft, they're never going to find a place on these big platforms. We just need a place for the professionals to talk to each other. I totally agree. We're niche but not that specialized where we're really going to publish things that are that sort of tactical and operational.

So I totally agree. I mean, I think this is one of those things where a rising tide floats all boats. The more you create this larger community of writers, I mean, one, the better served the nation will be. And two, the better served this entire ecosystem of writing and publishing will be because we'll end up publishing a lot of the same kinds of people on different things. And also as

People grow, mature, their careers progress. They'll go from publishing on tactical issues to strategic issues. So I think it's wonderful. Last question. What is a book that's been important to each of you at some point in your life? I'm coming out of a year of grad school. I have given myself six months to read whatever the heck I want. So I'm going on a science fiction journey. It's a series, Three-Body Problem by Xi Jinping. I probably butchered that. I'm a Russian speaker. Don't kill me.

And what I love about it, and as with any good science fiction, there's just enough realness in it to kind of make you lose sleep at night. But the reason I like this is it talks about crisis, competition, conflict, it mentions deterrence, how people come together or how they don't come together. So that's been kind of my fun read and I could not recommend it enough.

Yeah, I'm struggling because I don't know if I just have one. It's been like there's quite a few that just all equally have impacted me. I think if I had to boil it down to one, I would say Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. I think that's incredibly important for every NCO to read especially, but I mean every commander who is –

trying to have a really positive impact on their formations because it outlined, and it gives a lot of tangible ways to like create a high performing culture. But when you're able to do that, everything else follows afterwards really well. It doesn't matter what the task is. It doesn't matter what direction you're trying to move it into. You know, it sets your compass to the azimuth that you need and then where you can go after that is endless. So that's the one I'm

that had the biggest impact on me. Ryan, for me, it's got to be Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms in the Sword of Honor trilogy. Evelyn Waugh, I think it's Evelyn actually, he was a British humorist. He served in World War II and his books about war

World War II, their satire. But to me, they're just like such truth about the experience. And so I'm really grateful that War on the Rocks published my sort of review essay of that last November. Yeah, I love that. That was a great piece of writing. Yeah, I remember picking up like the green bound one off my shelf when I was in high school and reading it and then kind of being hooked on his work. But I probably read that books every couple of years and they really mean a lot to me. That's great. Well, I really appreciate you all coming on the show and thanks for

doing what you're doing. And I know that eventually you sort of all move on to different jobs in the army, but you'll all keep... I know you're all going to stay involved in this, which is one of the great things about writing is you can keep doing it no matter what you're doing. I was talking to... I caught up on a video chat with General McRyan from Australia a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about writing and he's getting...

I think his PhD in literature right now in retirement. And it's pretty amazing. And he started writing when he was a major. And he's had such a great impact through his writing and his leadership as well. And it's just a great example of what you can accomplish throughout a career. So thank you all for appearing on the show. Thanks, Ryan. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate it. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of War on the Rocks. Don't forget to check out our membership program at warontherocks.com slash membership. Stay safe and stay healthy.