Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
The future of drone warfare belongs to adaptive synthetic organisms, not flying flocks of kamikazes — swarms that can lose parts, reassign functions, and keep fighting, as living systems cannot. The future of drone warfare will not belong to the side that…
At the height of the space exploration era, General Vandenberg was a demi-god on a par with his civilian peers: Wernher von Braun, the creator of the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon; Robert Gilruth, the originator of…
Aristotle said it first: “Humans are social animals.” But the military, especially the American military, put this philosophical principle to use. The military does not teach you, as a long-abandoned recruitment slogan tried to convince our youth twenty years ago, to be…
The Navy SEALs (Sea, Air, and Land warriors) are deep thinkers. They even solved, in their own way, the age-old philosophical “mind-body problem”. The life principle that may be derived from their solution could help any civilian organization better integrate and care…
What does the Coast Guard do? It protects the coast. Not. Add: the Coast Guard is not a police force. It is not a maritime DMV. It is not a federal bureaucracy. It is not easy to define the United States Coast…
The ancient Roman general and Consul Cincinnatus lived, as Livy tells the story, with one hand on the sword and the other on the plowshares. Living centuries before the decline of the Empire, when military men became dictators, and the legions were…
I am not a squeamish man. I do not like seeing blood, but it does not scare me. My grandmother, born in 1900, kept chickens, pigs, sheep, a goat or two, cattle, dogs, and assorted cats. I saw my share of slaughtered…
The mission was simple; the fighters were not, and their understanding of what they were doing was even poorer. Yet they did their job BECAUSE of the chaos surrounding them. This is what they learned and will apply in their future civilian…
In the sixty-first year of my life, I was looking down into an abyss. Not of the existential kind. It was a very physical 60-foot drop into the well of the Marine Corps rappelling tower at the Marin Corps Recruit Depot, used…
Please cite Matei, S. A. (2022-2025). Transforming Warfighting: The Case for Software-Centric Strategies. Matei.org/I Think Blog. https://matei.org/ithink/2024/05/27/doing-more-with-less-a-data-model-driven-methodology-for-efficient-war-fighting-platforms-design/ Since time immemorial military technologies have been built “just in case,” focusing on technical superiority features. Firearms, artillery, ships, and later planes and missiles…
What are the necessary and sufficient factors that lead to the emergence and use of war-winning strategic technologies? The following definitions and assumptions may lead to the criteria and propositions capable of imagining new war-winning strategic technologies. We use them in the…
In my role as an Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Purdue University, I partnered with two colleagues with solid experience in military strategy research and education to propose a new methodology for training strategic thinkers and doers. David Benson,…
A potential favoring factor for the invasion of Ukraine and the threats made of China to occupy Taiwan could be that International trade clusters cut across political-military alliances. In a study I conducted with Nagisha Ishinabe and published in The National Interest…
What can we surmise about China’s intentions in the South China Sea? Although I have no crystal ball, in this National Interest article I offer some hard geographic, military, and economic facts. Analyzing what configurations of power projection and claim China has…
The development of AIs capable of targeting, shooting, and eliminating enemies in seconds has reached the threshold of possibility. There is much promise for creating strong defensive weapons but there is just as much fear. What if these AIs could turn rogue…