Articles
Ep 170- Making the Call: Military Intelligence, Judgment, and Command with Lieutenant General Tony Hale
Lieutenant General Tony Hale, the Army G-2, joins Joe for a conversation on military intelligence, judgment, and decision-making in modern war. Drawing on nearly four decades of service, Hale reflects on the evolution of the intelligence...
Ep 169- Open Doors & Hidden Worlds: The Power of Curiosity with Brad Meltzer
On the release of his latest thriller, The Viper: A Zig and Nola Novel, Brad Meltzer joins Joe for an in-depth conversation on writing, curiosity, service, and the often-hidden moments that shape a life. From bestselling thrillers to...
Twenty Years in Fourteen Lines
By Joe Byerly The man handed me the document fresh off the printer. “Make sure you keep this in a safe place,” he said. “This is your proof of service. Probably the most important document you’ll ever own.” I looked down at the still-warm DD214,...
Ep 168- Culture, Process, and Technology with General Christopher Donahue
Send us a text General Christopher Donahue, commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and Africa joins Joe for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, culture, and what it takes to drive real change at scale across massive, dispersed organizations....
Broadening with Purpose: Making the Most of the Army’s Broadening Opportunity Program
By Lyndi Dix During my time in company command, I was approached by a few mentors who encouraged me to consider the Broadening Opportunity Program (BOP) as I began thinking about what came next. I knew broadening was a common next step following...
A Body of Work
By Joe Byerly We start each year with the best of intentions, and then life happens. Dry January becomes Damp January. The gym membership app turns into just another unused icon on the phone. Weekly date nights, diets, check-ins with family and...
What Books Taught Me About Life in 2025
By Joe Byerly Since 2017, I’ve spent the final month of each year reflecting on the books I read over the previous twelve months. Without fail, a set of themes and lessons emerges from what initially feels like a random stack of titles and genres....
The Courage to Face Where You Are
By Joe Byerly For the second year in a row, I’ve traveled to Dallas for the Military Appreciation Bowl in an effort to talk to young men and women about the opportunities for serving in our Nation’s military. The multi-day event includes...
Would You Do it in Secret?
By Joe Byerly When I look back on a career’s worth of decisions, I can trace most of my motives to three sources: necessity, passion, and ego. The first is straightforward. I did a lot of things because they were required of me. I moved across the...
How to Make a Great Cup of Coffee with Carl Churchill
Alpha Coffee co-founder and retired Army lieutenant colonel Carl Churchill joins Joe for a candid conversation on leadership, resilience, and what it really takes to build something that lasts after the uniform comes off. After serving more...
Why Military Leaders Should Study Human Nature
By Joe Byerly This is the first question, in a five question interview with author Robert Greene. Joe: You’ve spent decades researching and writing about power, mastery, and war. In your latest book, The Laws of Human Nature, you have written what...
Warfare Has Moved On: The New Rules of War
By Joe Byerly One of my favorite books this year is Sean McFate’s The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder. Sean challenges everything I’ve learned over the last 15 years, and I can’t help but wonder if...
Five Army Commanders Worth Studying
This post originally appeared at Modern War Institute on January 8, 2019 By Joe Byerly When we begin our military careers we have choices when it comes to how we’ll develop our leadership abilities. We can, for example, go through our careers...
Want More Military Leaders Reading? Use The Pabst Blue Ribbon Strategy
By Joe Byerly Most military professionals agree that reading plays a critical role in professional development, however, the practice isn’t as widespread as it should be throughout the services. Unfortunately, self-development is about as...
August Cole, Science Fiction, and Whiskey: It’s a Thing
As February comes to a close, where are you at with the status of those New Year’s goals you made over a month ago? Are those resolutions nothing more than a distant memory? Whether it was a plan to exercise more, eat healthy, or finally quit a...
From Hal Moore’s Bookshelf: What He Underlined
By David Moore My father, LTG Hal Moore, passed away two years ago on this day -10 February, three days shy of his 95th birthday. The purpose of this article is to not seek empathy but to use the occasion to reinforce a few beliefs that...
General Donn Starry on Leadership
By Joe Byerly As military leaders we should want nothing more than to give our enemies an unfair fight—with the advantage in our favor. And one way in which we do this is through training our forces. I can’t think of anyone who has written as...
How to Increase Your Professional Reading
We all can agree that reading is good for the brain. Leaders from George Washington to General Patton leaned on books to fill their knowledge gaps, and their efforts paid off on the battlefield. Former Defense Secretary James Mattis reflected on...
5 Lessons Books Taught Me in 2018
Since 2013, I’ve written an annual blog post highlighting my favorite books from the previous 12 months. This year I wanted to try something different. I wanted to share some of the lessons I learned from the list of 40+ books I read....
8 Must-Read Science Fiction Books
Within the last few years, we’ve witnessed the evolution of biohacking, the rise of a state-based social credit system, and a US election influenced by the use of artificial intelligence. Futurists might be able to follow the thread...
A Cat, a Hat, and the Benefit of Constraints
By Joe Byerly In 1957, Theodor Geisel’s publisher challenged him to create a children’s book with characters, a plot, and all the trappings of a great story using only a first-grade vocabulary list of less than 250 words. He produced The Cat...
From Problem to Prototype: Innovating Dental Care for Large Scale Combat Operations from the Ground Up
By FiSamuel Reggans As the First Sergeant of a Dental Company Area Support (DCAS), I’ve long understood how critical dental readiness is to combat power, and that is no different in Large Scale Combat Operations (LSCO). However, the doctrine and...
Skip Band of Brothers, Watch Andor!
By MAJ Proto and 2LT Phocas It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that nearly every junior officer has seen at least some part of the HBO hit Band of Brothers during their formative professional military education. It might even be safe to...
Advocating for Apathy
WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 13: U.S. Army (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images) By Nathan A. Ballinger If everything is important, then nothing is. – Patrick M. Lencioni I’ve spent enough years as a senior noncommissioned...
Lay Your Ego Down (The Lumineers’ Version)
By Joe Byerly I caught The Lumineers in Raleigh this week. During the show, Wes Schultz mentioned that he and his bandmate Jeremiah Fraites have been writing and playing music together for over two decades. If you are a music fan like me, you...
The Day I Took Command: Leading Through Crisis and Learning Command in Real-Time
By Joe Hap The call came late. My commander had been in a serious accident. Suddenly, everything I thought I knew about leadership changed. In an instant, I wasn’t preparing for command—I was living it. No ceremony. No speeches. Just a...
The Power of Patience
by CPT Benjamin L. Kenneaster Patience is power. Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is “timing”. It waits on the right time to act, for the right principle and in the right way.-Fulton J. Sheen A Forgotten Principle An article from...
The Walls We Build
By Joe Byerly About a year ago, I got into an argument with my wife that spiraled way beyond what we were actually talking about. It began with a question about where to go for breakfast, but escalated into a full-blown shouting match. She said one...
The Tone Range Fan: A Tool for Leaders at All Levels
By COL Ed Arntson and LTC Erik Miller “We must strive to become experts in the human dimension. Wars are fought on land, by humans, and we must always work to become better at how we interact with one another to build trust and cohesion.” – GEN...
What is Power?
By Joe Byerly Two Army officers stand across from each other. Both are in their mid-50s. One slightly older, but only by a few years. Both wear stars on their shoulders. Both have commanded thousands of troops—the elder, tens of thousands. The...
4 Tips for Selling Your Ideas
By Joe Byerly Have you ever had an idea you thought was solid gold, but when you presented it to your boss or coworkers it fell on deaf ears? Maybe it wasn’t that your idea was bad. Maybe it was you. Hear me out: Sometimes our ideas ARE solid...
4 Tips from Sir Winston Churchill to Write Better Emails
By Joe Byerly Emails- They are the bane of our existence, but they are how we communicate in the modern world. Each day, military leaders clean out their inboxes only to have them fill back up within hours. Unfortunately, quantity doesn’t...
A Toast to Small Wars Journal
By Joe Byerly Much like many of the biggest comedians today can trace their beginnings back to the same comedy club, there are countless national security writers and senior military leaders who can trace their intellectual roots back to Small Wars...
How to Write as a Thinker-Practitioner
By Vincent A. Dueñas In his treatise, Why Don’t We Learn from History, B.H. Liddell Hart opens the first chapter with a general discussion of history and its merit. In describing the advancements of the conduct of warfare over the course of history...
An Open Letter to Battalion Commanders: How to Use Social Media
By Scotty Autin Commanders- I feel like most of us are missing an opportunity. We’re missing a chance to get the command messages out to audiences and shape the narrative of our units. More so, we’re missing a chance to talk directly to...
Why I Write: Pressing the Button
By Joe Byerly The following is an excerpt from the book, Why I Write: Craft Essays on Writing War, scheduled to be published by Middle West Press in December 2019. The one-of-a-kind anthology from the non-profit Military Writers Guild features...
Feedback Matters: How Poor Communication Can Lead to Bad Job Performance
By Joe Byerly (This post originally appeared on ClearanceJobs.com) Have you ever been caught off guard with a performance evaluation? Have you ever found out that the great job you thought you were doing wasn’t so great after all? I believe that...
Learn and Look Before You Tweet
Some things you should understand before jumping headfirst into the information environment By Larry Kay Last week was “media literacy week,” which unlike national doughnut and Twinkie day, should be elevated to a more prominent occasion given how...
Risk and Reward
By Josh Powers Last week, General Abrams (@DogFaceSoldier on Twitter) published a short article encouraging more senior leader engagement on social media. Titled Social Media: Senior Leaders Need to Get on the Bus, the article provides ten reasons...
Avoiding the Echo Chamber: Digital Media Leader Engagement and Education
By: L.M. Hughes In the wake of #AUSADigital2019, one of the most brilliant conversations I’ve seen on effective leader engagement on social media, led by From the Green Notebook’s very own Megan Jantos, I kept noticing how panelists and...
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