Author Archives: Douglas R. Satterfield
[October 21, 2026] Failure is not the enemy. That statement runs against the grain of how most people actually live. They treat a defeat as a catastrophe to be avoided, or as proof that their entire enterprise was mistaken from the start. The practical consequence is that they keep their aims deliberately vague. If the target is never… Read More »
[October 20, 2026] As noted in earlier articles (links here and here), I’m laying out the major elements, strategies, and inner-workings of the Iraq War as we approached the “Surge.” We were undergoing Base Development for a large increase in troop and equipment strength. The idea is that I will later turn this into a manuscript or book.… Read More »
[October 19, 2026] The first time you make your mother cry, something has shifted in you. It is not just that you feel bad. Feeling bad is easy, and most of the time it changes nothing. What has happened is that you have registered, for the first time, that your actions directly affected someone else; the person who… Read More »
[October 18, 2026] Aesop’s fable The Belly and the Members is one not often found in children’s books, but one that is both older and with considerable usefulness. I believe you will like the story and what it ultimately means. In the days when all the parts of the human body were not as now agreeing together, but… Read More »
[October 17, 2026] Unpredictable events, good or bad, hit people, organizations, and whole societies harder than anyone planned for. After the fact, someone always calls the outcome destiny. That is hindsight talking. We cannot predict these events. But we can build habits and systems that let us absorb the bad ones and use the good ones. Nassim Nicholas… Read More »
[October 16, 2026]. The recent video on AI Sees Western Civilization and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech got me thinking about the origins of the “rights” we enjoy. Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, produced one of the clearest statements of those rights. What did he mean by them? The answer sits at the… Read More »
Hero: Seaman Doug Hegdahl [October 15, 2026] Douglas Brent “Doug” Hegdahl III is a former U.S. Navy sailor and Vietnam War POW known for an extraordinary act of intelligence gathering while imprisoned at the Hỏa Lò Prison (the “Hanoi Hilton”). Today, I’m calling him a hero. He enlisted in the Navy in 1966 after high school. On the… Read More »
[October 14, 2026] I first saw this AI-generated video on Asmondgold. By yesterday afternoon, it had garnered 15 million views since its original posting on September 24. For some reason, I liked it. And now it’s here for your enjoyment, too. This is a roughly 2-minute-16-second stylized video (posted by @IterIntellectus with the note that he asked Claude… Read More »
[October 13, 2026] I finally decided it was time to review my time in the Iraq War, during the most contentious and most successful part during the war: late 2006 to 2007. Today, my subject will be the organization called MNSTC-I. “One advantage of hindsight is being able to pull current historical documents and align them with what we… Read More »
[October 12, 2026] Today, another of our favorite childhood stories that enthralled us: The Boy Who Cried Wolf. My interpretation of the story might just get my readers to pull that old book of Aesop’s Fables off the bookshelf and reread it. The story never gets old. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a short fable about what… Read More »