SITREP 1601200ZDEC23

Branding, beards, and ballcaps.

A situation report, or SITREP, is a brief summary of activity during a defined period of time. They are timestamped with a Date Time Group (DTG) broken down as DATE-TIME-TIMEZONE-MONTH-YEAR. These are meta-posts, not essays. Last SITREP 191200ZMAR23.

When I sat down to write this SITREP, The Powder Horn had 119 subscribers, which is 119 more than I started with a year ago. Here’s the chart showing steady growth over the past 11.5 months.

It’s pretty neat that 119 people have taken an interest in this modest collection of essays. It’s all free so I’m not going to overstate my own significance, but ‘tis the season for gratitude and I’m grateful to everyone who reads these screeds. I choose to write iff I can offer some useful insight, credible opinion, or lesson for a reader who I imagine as Shady Maples minus five years. A scan of the subscriber list tells me that maybe I should be writing instead for a hypothetical Shady Maples plus five/ten/fifteen years, and if I was trying to make a buck I would probably tailor my writing to that audience, but I’d rather have the professionals point out where I’ve gone astray than write pander pieces which take no ground and show no flanks.

By now you have likely noticed the masthead change. The Substack Previously Known As The Powder Horn is re-made as LOCON. Turns out there’s an Army Reserve regiment which has been publishing a newsletter called The Powder Horn for a lot longer than I have. Instead of chancing a scrap over copyright, I am preemptively ceding the ground and rebranding. The winter solstice is traditionally a celebration of rebirth and second chances, so I’ll raise my mug of coffee (plus Baileys) in toast to seasonal renewal.

On the topic of renewal, Austin Caroe (The Distro) recently posted an update. He’s been on hiatus for a few months – presumably deep in the jungle, neutralizing rogue Colonels with extreme prejudice - and I’m happy to see him back. Being an active duty officer isn’t a lifestyle conducive to posting high quality writing on a weekly basis and extended absences are part of the job. Austin built up quite a back catalogue and has disabled his paywall, so if you’re interested in practical insight into soldiering and leadership, I highly recommend The Distro. A few of my personal favourites are “Development Part 2”, “Advice”, and “Process”.

In true military fashion, Tyler Fox (Ridgeway’s Notebook) coined a new buzzword for the community of military writers that is cultivating on Substack: MILSTACK. #miltwitter is still active despite the generalized decay of that platform. I lurk on #canmiltwitter, which surfaces occasional gems (usually threads by Mid-Career Army Officer), but my silo is ~75% field officer circlejerk only a few mils removed from LinkedIn. MILSTACK is a slower feed with superior signal:noise. Unless you’re a journalist looking for leads or a para-socialite looking for drama, my (totally objective and unbiased) opinion is that MILSTACK has superior offerings. Down with #miltwitter, up with MILSTACK!

In other news, perfidious Albion has appropriated another artifact of colonial culture:

Beards were our thing dammit! Now the only thing that sets the Canadian Army apart is bongs and it’s generally frowned upon to call a smoke mission in non-permissive environments.

This dramatic escalation from across the pond demands a resolute and truly hoser response: we must immediately authorize the wearing of ballcaps in all orders of operational dress in order to enhance lethality and retain decisive overmatch in Look Cool Factor (LCF). My fellow Canadians, we cannot abide a ballcap gap!¹

That just aboot sums it up. I’ll be on leave until the new year. All this white space is welcome respite from a job where I experience time as a series of fifteen-minute blocks stretching from now to Annual Posting Season next summer. Expect a few back-pocket pieces to come out over the holidays, which will be notes or comments I’ve posted elsewhere but edited into short form essays. I am working concurrently on two new pieces, one on cycles and levels of decision-making which is currently in the conceptual stage, and another on the difference between scepticism and cynicism for which I have an outline.

In the meantime, gather round the wood stove with friends and family to celebrate the turning of the year. The fire doesn’t stoke itself.

1. This proposal is aimed squarely at the Canadian Army, since the RCN, RCAF, CANSOFCOM, and CJOC (on a mission-by-mission basis) have all approved comfortable and practical head coverings for their working dress. All my efforts to raise this urgent issue to the Army Dress Committee have failed.