I’ve been part of this lash up, at least on the margins, for just shy of 20 years. I haven’t been doing much here for the last dozen, just a very small role in keeping the lights on. It’s been a long goodbye for me, but now it’s finally almost here. Goodbye.
Dave Dilegge and I formed Small Wars Journal in 2005. We were working at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. Small wars were booming. Dave had his prior work from the Urban Operations Journal and MOUT Homepage to inform a vision for a way to make meaningful contributions of to our warfighters who were grasping for information and insights. So we put together some stuff along that prior model and slapped it up on the web to try to help out a bit.
Small Wars Journal quickly became relevant. At first, it was a brochureware listing of useful links, curated for relevance to folks who were busy working at small wars but could use some information. We started publishing a few articles. We turned on little still sort of new-ish internet features like comments. We added the Small Wars Council, a once-vibrant discussion board. SWJ got some interest, created a little buzz, and I like to think it helped some people out.
It is fitting and appropriate to recognize Small Wars Journal as Dave’s baby. It consumed him and he is at the center of all its successes. He was energetic and passionate about the cause, advancing the field, and working with and making connections between all the practitioners, pundits, and students of small wars. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of small wars resources and activities, and a tremendous ability to steer people and information together for effect.
It isn’t the slightest bit wrong to refer to SWJ for the majority of its existence as a one-man operation under Dave Dilegge, on the production front. But it also isn’t entirely correct. Dave was the constant and the unblinking eye at the center of everything, but a lot of folks threw their hats into the ring and did good work for SWJ. Robert Haddick, Peter Munson, and Mike Few spent some time co-editing with Dave. Dan Kelly and Dave Maxwell joined as board members. John Sullivan and Robert Bunker grew the El Centro concept and team. Tom Odom, Tedd Baggson, Steve Blair, Jon Custis, and David Page wrangled the discussion board. Many folks offered to lend a hand, including Abbie Evans and Bret Perry; we were notoriously ineffective at engaging the skills and enthusiasm of many folks who raised their hand. Outside of the boiler room, we benefitted greatly from kind words, referrals, and support from emerging rock stars like Dave Kilcullen and John Nagl. We were found by an anonymous benefactor and received great care from Nadia then Chris. We would hear through the grapevine that James Mattis would mention or refer to SWJ items, and Martin Dempsey wrote some. And we were overwhelmed by contributions of works from authentic voices with something important to say about small wars.
I’m missing many names and events. SWJ’s successes were the successes of a passionate small wars community. Around Dave.
Dave Dilegge passed away in May, 2020. I’m convinced the News Roundup helped kill him. It was a time suck, a source of stress, and a source of emails pleading for its return whenever he cut if off. He had a love-hate relationship with that, would quit producing it for a while when it had beaten him down too much, start feeling better, then go back to it like crack cocaine. The last time we spoke, he was preparing to move back to Maryland from Tampa and was optimistic about better days ahead. Unfortunately, he didn't last until they arrived.
Dave Maxwell stepped up and took the helm as SWJ Editor. We had a bit of a surge for a while with help from Dan Riggs, Riley Murray, Duncan Moore, Ahyoung Shin, and Marina Booth. El Centro has been a juggernaut for a long while and continued to be througout, impaired only by our crappy technical platform. But the rest of SWJ has been in pseudo-hospice care for a bit. I applaud Dave Maxwell for finding SWJ a new home with ASU, working with Ryan Shaw to make it happen. It’s a good fit and bodes well. We were happy to gift SWJ’s intellectual property to ASU, contribute residual resources to the LONG overdue site update, and pray for rain.
The new team will follow their muse as they breathe life back into what SWJ was and can be. I wish them well. I am grateful they endorse the central notion of our original vision for SWJ. One spin on that is that small wars are messy, there are a lot of folks that have something worthwhile to say, and a platform for sharing good information, including information that you disagree with or never considered, can be very helpful. Non-dogmatic. Thoughtful, authentic voices.
I am confident that the new organization and upcoming re-launch will deliver the production capacity and functional site that SWJ has long been lacking. More folks toiling in the boiler room. First world web stuff like usable search, a tagging schema, comments that are turned on and not overwhelmed by spam. Fog a mirror type stuff that we stopped being able to do a while back. All of which will enable engaging with the community to advance the field.
I am hopeful that the operation will grow back to include and extend upon important things from our past capabilities or aspirations:
- Curated references and links in addition to the flow of new works. It’s nice to have a steady flow of articles for regulars to view. It’s also nice to have a place for newcomers to start to orient on the field and its key topics, tenets, and tensions. It would be nice to have the flow of that publishing river along with the stability of a library lake. We had a bit of it, briefly, long ago and high hopes for more that we did not achieve.
- Ways for members of the community to connect. The web has evolved a great deal and I question whether a discussion board is the right tool. Something that allows site users to set the topic rather than derail discussions under article comments was useful back in our heyday and I think remains so today, albeit in different form(s).
Looking back in the files, I chuckled to see that our meeting on 22 Jan 2005 to form as a Virginia LLC was held in an IHOP on Rte 610 in Stafford. Not exactly Tun Tavern. Small Wars Journal, LLC was superseded by Small Wars Foundation in 2008. I did some of the paperwork for that formation and transition, pictured below in action, from Jinja, Uganda, near the source of the Nile while working on an ACOTA training mission for Ugandan forces headed to Somalia. That may have been my zenith of operational relevance. I will shut down Small Wars Foundation when the last bits of the site transition are complete.
I look forward to seeing how the new Small Wars Journal and the whole small wars community come together to further the work to which Dave Dilegge dedicated his last two decades.
Fair winds and following seas.
- Bill
