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Officer's staff college essay completely changes world's understanding of warfare
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Officer's staff college essay completely changes world's understanding of warfare

Apr 8, 2017
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Officer's staff college essay completely changes world's understanding of warfare
www.duffelblog.com

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — An essay written by a student at the Army's Command and General Staff College has completely changed the western world's centuries-old ideas on warfare, sources confirmed today.

Maj. Jeffrey Branks, who wrote most of the paper while waiting in the car to pick his daughter up from soccer practice on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, says it is "basically the Sun Tzu of our generation."

"Chaos. Friction. Uncertainty. I came up with all of those ideas," said Branks, slowly taking off his reading glasses then putting them back on. "I'm certain to get a command assignment after this one."

Branks wrote the essay, entitled "On War: A Paradime Shift," as a requirement for graduation from the school. He noted after turning in the paper that the spelling of "Paradime" was not, in fact, a typo, but a "subtle reference to the elements of national power," or DIME model.

Branks admits that writing the essay was not an easy task. He says the three hours he put in to edit the final draft were especially grueling, as he was milking a "Clausewitzian hangover" on Sunday morning.

While 10 pages, including citations, were more than he had written in total since college, he was able to adapt and overcome the challenge.

"Deception. Flexibility. Increasing the font size of my periods. That's what Jomini would have done," he said. "I haven't actually read anything he's written, but I'm told he would have done that."

Branks' classmates initially doubted that his work would have the revolutionary effect that it did, especially since his first draft was just the Ranger Creed copied and pasted 17 times in a row. Still, most say the rewrite was stunning.

"China might as well just give up right now," said Maj. Steve Green. "Jeffrey is about to wipe the floor with them."

His work will be available to the masses, as long as they have a CAC and an AKO account, when it is published in the next edition of the widely read Doctrine Semi-Quarterly newsletter.

Update: Sources allege that Branks may have plagiarized from the 1992 CGSC essay "Why We'll Obviously Never Wage Another Counterinsurgency," which itself was famous for plagiarizing the 1986 essay "My Personal Experiences in the Franco-Prussian War."

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