To defeat an adversary, you must first understand him. To understand him, you must think like him. To think like him consistently, over years of operational focus, is to allow his logic to occupy space in your mind that belonged to something else. Nobody warns you about that part.
2026/07/27
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"Why Special Forces Soldiers Are Trained to Think Like the Enemy — And What That Does to Them"
Red teaming — the deliberate assumption of an adversary's perspective to stress-test your own plans and identify vulnerabilities — is standard practice in special operations planning.
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The Green Berets who spent years focused on Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula developed fluency in the theological and ideological framework that AQAP used to justify its operations — not because they agreed with it, but because countering it effectively required understanding it from the inside.
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