The Friday Formation
Friday, 24 July 2026
This week’s dispatch on Army writing, leadership, and learning
🗓️ Editor’s Note
A brigade goes to the Mojave and relearns the defining problem of the modern battlefield. Last month at the National Training Center, the Spartan Brigade threw loitering munitions, reconnaissance drones, and electronic effects at the enemy — and still found its tanks and Bradleys hunted by the same cheap systems that have reshaped Eastern Europe. The lesson is not that we lack answers. It is that no single answer will be everywhere, at every echelon, all the time.
That is why I want you to read two pieces together this week. In the Modern War Institute, an officer just back from Security Assistance Group–Ukraine makes the case for passive defense — netting, hardening, concealment, dispersion — as normal practice, not a step backward. In a companion argument, another MWI author reframes how we buy and adapt this technology and puts it plainly: “Every one of these risks is manageable. What is no longer manageable is the risk of fielding a force that cannot adapt at the speed of the fight.”
The branch journals came in strong — a full slate from the Warrant Officer Journal, Gray Space, Field Artillery, and the rest — and Military Review’s new July-August issue takes us into the jungle to argue the environment itself is an active combatant. Plenty here.
Get after it.
Chris
🏛️ Featured Leadership Essays
📌 Survival Skills: Why the Army Needs to Relearn Passive Defense
By an officer of Security Assistance Group–Ukraine — Modern War Institute
Fresh from Ukraine, the author watched convoys drive for kilometers under netting strung over the roads near Izium. His argument: active C-UAS — guns, missiles, EW, lasers, interceptors — cannot carry the whole survivability burden. Passive defense (netting, hardening, overhead cover, concealment, deception, dispersion, disciplined displacement) has to become normal. Not a retreat to trench warfare — a practical answer to a battlefield where detection is constant and precision attack is cheap.
▶ Related: Video: Russian drones attack Ukrainian infantry — note the road netting throughout
Modern War Institute
A framework for adapting at the speed of the fight. As the author puts it: “The tactical risk of an unauthorized battlefield modification pales in comparison to the strategic risk of sending our forces into combat with obsolete technology that gets them killed.” And the line worth taping to the wall: “Every one of these risks is manageable. What is no longer manageable is the risk of fielding a force that cannot adapt at the speed of the fight.”
Military Review, July-August 2026
BLUF: in the jungle, both the enemy and the environment are trying to kill you. Drawing on research from a forthcoming book on the Pacific and Burma campaigns, the author argues that dense biomass and equatorial climate nullify industrial-age technological advantage and force a regression to primitive close combat. As the force pivots to the Indo-Pacific, he warns that modern reliance on MDO, AI, and autonomous systems may leave us more vulnerable to “rot” — the decay of materiel and troops alike — than we were in 1944.
📚 Resources & Calls
● Recommended Articles – Army University Press
● Professional Writing Playlist (YouTube) – Talks and discussions on military writing.
● Professional Military Writing – Military Review – Why writing matters.
🧰 TL;DR
● Quick Read: Army’s Heavy Units Face Counter-Drone Capability Gaps
● Deep Dive: Survival Skills: Why the Army Needs to Relearn Passive Defense
● Listen: The Spear – The Crucible of Innovation in the Indo-Pacific
● For the Formation: The Blood Bank and the Logistics of Wartime Medicine
⚔️ Warfighting
🚁 Army’s Heavy Units Face Counter-Drone Capability Gaps
By Jon Harper — DefenseScoop
At Fort Irwin last month, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team ran loitering munitions, reconnaissance drones, and electronic effects alongside its tanks and Bradleys — and leaders acknowledged that unmanned systems remain an enduring problem for tank-centric formations, exactly as heavy units across Eastern Europe have found.
🕸️ Survival Skills: Why the Army Needs to Relearn Passive Defense
Modern War Institute
The case for netting, hardening, concealment, dispersion, and disciplined displacement as normal practice — because active counter-drone systems can’t be everywhere at once.
Military Review, July-August 2026
In the “Green Hell,” technology succumbs to humidity, corrosion, and disease. A hard look at the tyranny of terrain — and why 1944’s lessons are urgent as the Army pivots to the tropics.
🌏 Gray Zone Contestation Between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea
By Michael MacArthur Bosack — Irregular Warfare Initiative
With attention fixed on the Middle East and Ukraine, Bosack examines the opportunism risk in the Yellow Sea and how below-threshold pressure between the Koreas could tip toward escalation.
🛰️ Information Disorder and Irregular Warfare: Three Things to Know
By Tyler Pratt and Julia Morse — Irregular Warfare Initiative
When Operation Epic Fury kicked off, a parallel war began online — fought with deepfakes and manipulated narratives. What practitioners need to understand about information disorder.
🔭 Deep Reconnaissance: The Need for Long-Range Reconnaissance and Surveillance in LSCO
Infantry — Line of Departure
The case for rebuilding deep reconnaissance and surveillance capability for large-scale combat operations.
⚡ How a Strike Platoon Fights: Early Observations
Infantry — Line of Departure
Early field observations on organizing and fighting a strike platoon on the drone-saturated modern battlefield.
🔧 Delivering Ready Combat Power
🩸 The Blood Bank and the Logistics of Wartime Medicine
By Naveen Krishnan — War on the Rocks (Cogs of War)
For most of history, disease and uncontrolled hemorrhage — not enemy fire — killed the most soldiers. A history of how military medicine closed the gap, and the enduring logistics problem of keeping blood ready where the wounded fall.
🚁 Broken Drone, Far from Home: The Case for Overseas Autonomous System Sustainment
By Dan Justice — War on the Rocks
As autonomous systems proliferate, who fixes them forward? The case for standing up an overseas sustainment enterprise before the drones outrun the maintainers.
🎯 Survive to Fight: Operationalize the Drone Fight in Modern Field Artillery Operations
Field Artillery — Line of Departure
How field artillery formations can operationalize the drone fight — integrating UAS and counter-UAS into fires while staying alive under a persistent sensor-to-shooter threat.
📡 Engineering Resilient Fire Support in LSCO: Electromagnetic Warfare Considerations
Field Artillery — Line of Departure
Building fire-support architectures that survive contested electromagnetic spectrum conditions in large-scale combat operations.
💊 Budgeting for Expendable Medical Materiel in the Operating Force
Pulse of Army Medicine — Line of Departure
A practical look at resourcing and budgeting expendable medical materiel so operating-force units are ready when casualties come.
🔄 Continuous Transformation
Modern War Institute
A framework for managing — not ignoring — the risks of adapting fast enough to survive the drone age.
🧠 The Make-or-Buy Line has Moved
By Jacob Green — War on the Rocks
An Army acquisition officer argues agentic AI has collapsed the cost of in-house software development, and that the department should rethink what it buys, what it builds, and how.
Gray Space — Line of Departure
How one brigade wove electromagnetic warfare and multi-domain integration into its transition to a Mobile Brigade Combat Team.
Gray Space — Line of Departure
A read on how current policy opens the door to industry partnership for fielding agentic AI across the force.
📜 Strengthening the Profession of Arms
By Sam Balch and Sara Roger — From the Green Notebook
Two first-year KD majors on building teams and systems under pressure — and the leadership lessons they earned the hard way.
🏛️ What Odysseus Knew About Coming Home: The Veteran’s Second Odyssey
By Joe Byerly — From the Green Notebook
Byerly turns to Homer to explore the homecoming every service member eventually faces — and why the hardest passage often begins after the uniform comes off.
🧭 About the Harding Project Substack
The Harding Project Substack is the volunteer-run platform to support professional writing for the US Army.
The one-stop shop for all branch journal articles is the Line of Departure website – check it out to get your daily dose of Army professional development! If you have good ideas or lessons to share with our network, please pen them and send them our way at submissions@hardingproject.com.
We’re renewing professional writing across the force—one Friday at a time. Read. Reflect. Act. The profession doesn’t stand still, and neither should we.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this Substack are the authors’ personal perspectives as private individuals. They do not represent the official views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Army, or any other government agency or military organization.
Any references to military topics, doctrine, history, or current events are for informational, educational, or discussion purposes only and should not be interpreted as official guidance, strategy, or representation of U.S. Army or Department of War positions.
Readers are encouraged to consult official sources for authoritative information.
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