Notice What You Notice

Last week, I wrote about how I’m using AI, PIRs, CCIRs, and a simple situational-awareness process to pay attention without living in the news.

The idea is pretty simple: scan broadly, verify what matters, and pay attention to the things that make me want to ask another question.

A few things did that this week.

What’s happening in Europe’s “rear area”?

I’ve noticed a steady stream of reporting involving drones, cyber activity, sabotage investigations, undersea infrastructure, and European governments talking more openly about protecting critical infrastructure from Russian hybrid activity.

Germany has been strengthening defenses against drones, cyber intrusions, and sabotage. France is doing the same. European leaders are discussing more coordinated responses to sabotage, arson, drone incursions, and similar activity.

I don’t know that all of those things belong together.

That’s what makes me curious.

Are these largely independent incidents receiving more attention because of the war in Ukraine? Are European governments simply becoming more sensitive to vulnerabilities that have always existed? Or are enough similar things happening that we’re beginning to see a pattern?

What would I expect to see next if it is a pattern?

And perhaps just as importantly, what evidence would convince me that it isn’t?

I’m watching.

What matters more: how many troops move, or what moves with them?

I’ve spent a lot of time this week looking at U.S. military posture in the Middle East.

A headline might tell me that 2,000 troops deployed or that a deployment was extended.

Okay.

Which 2,000?

Command and control? Air defense? Artillery? Aviation? Engineers? Intelligence? Logistics? Sustainment?

That question has increasingly caught my attention.

What can the composition of a force tell us that the number alone cannot?

Does an extended deployment represent simply maintaining additional personnel in theater, or does the particular combination of capabilities tell us something about what military planners want to remain prepared to do?

Having spent much of my adult life in the Army, this is one I’m particularly interested in watching.

What happens when I stop watching individual incidents and look at the map?

The Strait of Hormuz has had my attention for a while.

This week I found myself looking farther west toward the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb too.

There has been continued disruption around Hormuz. Meanwhile, Houthi activity in Yemen and concerns about shipping through Bab el-Mandeb have kept another critical maritime route on my radar.

Rather than trying to predict what happens next, I’ve become interested in a different set of questions.

How much of the world’s energy and commerce moves through these relatively small pieces of geography?

What happens when risk increases around more than one of them at the same time?

What do shipping companies do? Insurers? Airlines? Energy producers? Militaries?

And where would I see the consequences first?

I’m less interested in predicting the next attack than understanding the system surrounding it.

How much of the “China-Russia-Iran” story is actually a story we’re creating?

I’ve been deliberately watching the relationships among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

There are real connections there.

But this week I was reminded to be careful about making those relationships cleaner than they really are.

China reportedly pressed Iran to use its influence to restrain the Houthis after Saudi Arabia sought Beijing’s help.

That made me stop.

What happens when China’s relationship with Iran collides with China’s need for reliable energy supplies and international shipping?

Where do Chinese and Iranian interests overlap?

Where don’t they?

The same questions apply to Russia and North Korea.

Instead of asking whether these countries are “together,” I’m becoming more interested in asking where their interests intersect, where they diverge, and what happens when the two compete.

That’s a much more interesting question.

So what am I noticing?

Maybe the common thread this week is that I’m becoming less interested in individual events and more interested in the questions around them.

What else is happening?

What would I expect to see next?

What evidence would change my mind?

What happens somewhere else if this continues?

And am I connecting dots because there’s actually a line between them, or because human beings are remarkably good at finding patterns?

If I allow myself one small inference from this week’s observations, it’s that a lot of consequential activity seems to be occurring below the threshold of the really big headline. Military positioning, infrastructure protection, shipping patterns, economic interests, cyber activity, and relationships between countries may tell us something long before there’s a single event that tells us everything.

Maybe.

That’s why I’m watching rather than concluding.

And that’s really the point of this exercise.

Stay curious. Ask better questions. Look for evidence that you’re wrong as deliberately as evidence that you’re right. Notice what you notice. Then go live your life.

If you’d like to experiment with this yourself, I’ve shared the basic prompt and process I use to build my daily situational-awareness brief here:

Build Your Own Situational Awareness Brief →

Don’t copy my priorities. Build your own. What matters to you, your family, your work, and your readiness will probably be different from what matters to me.

That’s the point.

Fit for Function. Ready for Life.