Andy Stumpf on a War Changing Its Face

Technology Shortens the Distance

For Stumpf, war becomes closer at the very moment it becomes more distant. Commercial drones, sensors, and AI do not eliminate close combat, but they compress the time between observation and decision, and make violence more accessible to anyone with a connection. His thesis is simple: technology extends the gaze, but it does not erase the responsibility of the person deciding when to pull the trigger.

For us, drones were Predator or Reaper, surveillance platforms overhead, with big sensors and the ability to see what they saw. I never once thought someone could order a drone on the internet and turn it into a kinetic option on the battlefield.

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The idea that drone warfare would be that never even crossed my mind. And seeing people run from a DJI that blows up is an absolute no for me.

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Stumpf insists the change is not only about firepower, but about the shape of the damage. He says many drone injuries resemble those caused by IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they are still blast injuries, though he admits he does not yet know whether they are more severe. For him, the key point is that war has become both more digital and more archaeological, with trenches and pistols on the corner in the same theater of operations.

In Ukraine, at the exact same time they’re at the cutting edge of electronics, you see videos of men running through trenches and shooting at each other from across a room. It is a mix of innovation, evolution, and human, face-to-face contact.

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When the conversation turns to AI, Stumpf raises the alarm without claiming the machine is already in control. He distinguishes human-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop, and human-out-of-the-loop, and says that last phase is what worries everyone. His objection is not romantic, it is operational: if a machine makes decisions faster than a human adversary, the only way to stay competitive is to risk copying it.

The phase that terrifies everybody is when the human is out of the loop. If you remove the human, I don’t see how you fight that without doing exactly the same thing.

Selection Forged Character

In the SEALs, Andy Stumpf says, character does not come from being nearly superhuman, but from how a person handles pressure without going off the rails. In his view, selection is there to find who can follow procedures, stay calm, and avoid turning panic into sterile improvisation. The romantic idea of the exceptional warrior, he says, makes more noise than it really explains.

In the SEALs, what matters are very ordinary people being asked to do extraordinary things.

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These are not people putting on a cape and going to work. They are very ordinary people, sometimes tasked with doing extraordinary things.

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Stumpf stresses that the hardest school does not select heroes, but people who can avoid breaking when the body is already under stress and the mind wants to invent an exit. He says the essential thing is not inspiration, but the ability to stay inside a procedure when everything around you pushes the opposite way. It is a useful reversal: military value, in this version, looks less like natural talent than repeated discipline.

Skill and having all the boxes checked are not the same thing. You need to be competent and current to fly a multi-million-dollar aircraft in a place where you have to stay sharp.

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The passage on SERE school^* is Stumpf’s way of saying training matters mainly because it teaches people to remain functional when the environment turns hostile and ambiguous. He describes weeks of navigation, simulated capture, and interrogation, but dismisses the idea that the course creates supermen. It instead creates people who know what to do when the situation deteriorates and instinct pushes them to let go.

It’s a week of classroom instruction, and a lot of it, when I did it, was based on Vietnam. We studied the Hanoi Hilton a lot and the tap codes they created among themselves.

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The Problem Is Staying in the Frame

Stumpf shifts the center of gravity: failure, he says, almost never comes from the body when the real problem is staying inside a mental frame that is already cracked. As long as a goal feels too far away, too large, or too vague, the mind looks for shortcuts, reads discomfort as proof of defeat, and confuses fatigue with the real limit. That is where the SEAL story stops being heroic and becomes more ordinary, and more useful: discipline is what keeps you in the task when the mind already wants out of the room.

We confused suppression with strength,” Stumpf said. “Sometimes it is simply easier to stay in something that is destroying you than admit you need to leave.

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His thesis rests on a distinction that is almost moral to him: resisting does not always mean enduring. In special operations vocabulary, he explains, the cult of “never quit” can become an identity trap, because it pushes people to stay in relationships, jobs, or habits that are now eroding everything else. The issue, in his telling, is not to reward those who leave too early, but to recognize that stubbornness can be a form of self-deception too.

As long as you see yourself as the kid who never lets go, you stay trapped in that story,” he said. “If you have a problem with alcohol, you can’t say: ‘never quit’ and keep going as if nothing were wrong.

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Psychological pain erodes in small pieces, usually over a very long period,” he said. “You can always keep going one more day, until the damage is already accumulated.

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From there, Stumpf broadens the argument to personal responsibility. The formula he uses is simple to the point of hardness: as long as a person sees himself as the victim of circumstances, he remains at the mercy of the wind; when he owns his responses, he regains at least part of the control. Freedom, in his version, does not mean deciding everything, but stopping the habit of blaming everything that happens on the outside.

As long as you do not see yourself as the author of your life, you will be the victim of your life,” he said. “You have almost no control over what happens to you, but you have total control over how you respond.

War, Politics, and Human Cost

The sharpest part of the final section is also the most uncomfortable: Stumpf does not talk about war as a courage problem, but as one of prudence. When conflicts become permanent, and decisions come from far away, he argues, the risk is not only strategic; it is moral, political, and human. That is why he insists that those who send others to fight should have more skin in the game than they do now.

I think we need to be better than that. If we want to be a beacon for the world, we need to be better than that.

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It is a horrible war, and it will show you the best of what you are and the worst of what you never thought you could be.

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His argument starts from a specific memory of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, but goes beyond the individual act. Stumpf distinguishes killing in combat from striking a body that has already been neutralized, and uses that difference to talk about rules, guardrails, and national reputation. If a video of an Iranian pilot being killed at point-blank range online would not be acceptable to Americans, he says, then it should not be normalized when Americans are the ones doing it.

From there, the discussion slides into the twenty years of the war on terror, which he sees as an exercise without a final objective. Afghanistan, he says, achieved its military goals in about 90 days, and yet the United States stayed 20 years; the withdrawal left behind equipment, images, and a sense of strategic emptiness. Iraq serves the same purpose for him: without a definable end state, you enter a toxic relationship with war, pull back, then start again.

Our military objectives in Afghanistan were achieved in about 90 days. We stayed there 20 years.

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I get very concerned when there is no definable end state.

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