Every war forecast of the last century failed — and some things about the next war can be known anyway. That tension is what this project is about, and over the past ten days it produced five essays on brauer.dev, the opening set of a project drawn from the book manuscript I am completing on the doctrine gaps of recent wars.
This letter is the digest: every two to three weeks, what has appeared — one sentence each — plus one thing worth reading. Nothing lives here exclusively; everything links back to the site.
The essays so far
What Must Be True About the Next War — Defence forecasting fails so reliably that failure is the field’s best-documented finding, yet seven statements about the next decade can be deduced rather than predicted — each with the condition that would prove it wrong.
https://brauer.dev/writing/what-must-be-true-about-the-next-war/
The Douhet Trap — In 1924 the Royal Air Force formally exempted its bomber doctrine from the lessons of military history, and three tells reveal which of today’s drone and AI claims are built the same way.
https://brauer.dev/writing/the-douhet-trap/
The Sky Is Alive — But Not Everywhere — The transparent battlefield is a gradient with workable edges rather than a law, and the seven-month arc of the Kursk operation shows both what manufactured blindness buys and what it cannot.
https://brauer.dev/writing/the-sky-is-alive/
No Maverick Wins — The scholar who counted twenty-one cases of military innovation found the opposite of the rebel myth: innovation is carried by insiders who open promotion pathways. The real test of any innovation hub is who makes general.
https://brauer.dev/writing/no-maverick-wins/
Decapitation Works on Systems, Not Societies — Twelve days of war in June 2025 split the post-2022 consensus on decapitation into a sharper rule: killing a command layer reliably silences the system beneath it and reliably fails to break the society above it.
https://brauer.dev/writing/decapitation-systems-not-societies/
And the first field note, published this morning
The army that taught the lesson failed the exam — Russia demonstrated the signature-strike lesson at Zelenopillia in 2014 and failed its own exam at Makiivka in 2023, which says something uncomfortable about how armies learn.
https://brauer.dev/notes/the-army-that-taught-the-lesson/
One thing worth reading
Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (2017). Freedman traces a century and a half of confident forecasts about the next war and shows how reliably they went wrong — and, more usefully, why: they were rarely neutral analysis and usually arguments about the present wearing the future as a costume. If the essays above have a single intellectual debt, it is to this habit of asking what a forecast is for before asking whether it is right.
If you know someone who reads in this field, forward this letter — that is the whole growth strategy.
Christoph