by Charles C. Jett

The Art of War: Rewritten – What Iran and Ukraine Reveal About Two Theories of Victory

Two wars ran at once this spring—the U.S. air campaign against Iran and Ukraine’s long-range strikes against Russia—and set side by side they reveal two fundamentally different theories of how a war is won. In “The Art of War: Traditional vs. New,” Charles C. Jett weighs decision-through-dominance against decision-through-system-attrition, follows the cost-exchange arithmetic that makes the new art possible, and refuses the easy thesis that the old art is obsolete—Fordow, after all, sits under a mountain no cheap drone can reach. The hard conclusion: the danger is not that America fought Iran the old way, but that the old way may be the only art it still knows how to practice, while the new one is being invented, industrialized, and proven elsewhere—on an industrial foundation America has let decay.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Iran War Ledger—What Operation Epic Fury Changed—and What It Did Not

On February 28, 2026, the largest American air campaign in the Middle East since 2003 began. A hundred and seven days later, a ceasefire was signed. But what did the war actually settle? In “The Iran War Ledger,” Charles C. Jett sets the region before the bombing against the region today—the nuclear file, the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s decapitated leadership, the money spent, the gutted-but-ascendant Revolutionary Guard, America’s frayed alliances, and the strained partnership with Israel—and finds a hard truth beneath the signature ceremony: the war changed almost everything except the thing it was launched to fix. A clear-eyed, non-partisan accounting of a peace that rests on a fault line.

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – Am I a Man?

One seat, lawfully won. One vote, already written. A legislature that set aside the law to decide a single question: whether a Black man it had seated was a man at all. Henry McNeal Turner had every reason to plead. His colleagues did — appealing to the mercy of the men about to expel them. Turner called that what it was: slaves begging under the lash. He would not do it. He stood and demanded the rights he already held, and he made the chamber put its cruelty on the record. They expelled him anyway. The men who voted him out are remembered now as part of the Republic’s founding generation in Georgia. The man who refused to kneel had to be rediscovered. He claimed the rights of a man by refusing to ask for them. Henry McNeal Turner needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – The Defendant Who Put the Law on Trial

Accused of treason four times. Tried for his life three times. Acquitted by juries to roaring crowds — and jailed by the government anyway. John Lilburne refused the Star Chamber oath that would have made him convict himself, and took the whip and the pillory rather than surrender the point. He turned every courtroom into a public seminar on the rights of a free Englishman, reading the law aloud to the men who meant to hang him. The right to remain silent, the right to see the charge, the right to counsel, the jury’s power to refuse a bad law — he fought for them first, alone, with his back already scarred. John Lilburne needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – The Letters Written Toward the Stake

A written promise of safe conduct, sealed by an emperor. A cell beside a sewer. Eight months of chains. A clean offer to walk free, repeated every single time: take back your words and live. That was the bargain the Council of Constance set in front of Jan Hus in 1415. He would not take it. He told them he would recant gladly the moment they showed him from Scripture that he was wrong — but he would not swear to lies he had never preached, not for a chapel full of gold. So they burned him, scraped up his ashes, and poured them in the Rhine so no one could kneel where he fell. They erased the man and missed the letters. A century later, a monk in Germany read them and called himself a Hussite. Jan Hus needs to be remembered.

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