Posts by Michael E. Collins

Suppose Putin gets the terms he wants in Ukraine. What has he actually bought?
This article looks at the war through an investor’s eyes. Moscow could take more territory and still spend years paying to hold and rebuild it. At home, winding down military production would put jobs at risk in towns that depend on defense orders. Keeping the war unresolved may be the safest course for Putin, even as the costs for Russia mount.

This three-part series uses the Athlon Sports v. Duggan case to explain how fairness is judged in corporate transactions, covering how courts value a company, what a fairness opinion does and doesn’t say, and how boards and special committees should be chosen and advised.

Despite $8.6 billion in startup funding in 2026 and a steady stream of viral videos, humanoid robots remain slow and limited in real work, shipping only about 20,000 units worldwide in 2025 and often losing out to conventional robot arms, so the real test is whether they can do a specific job more reliably, safely, and cheaply than the best alternative.

Changes in military leadership, including the removal of senior officers and cuts to general-officer positions, are at the center of the Pentagon’s agenda, and the key question is whether these decisions reflect real requirements, judgments about individuals, or both, and how the country will know if they work.

In this article, I borrow Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver and the Lilliputians to look at a real question: how smaller states can use inexpensive drones to constrain the choices of a much larger military power. It is satire on the surface, but the argument underneath, about scale, procurement speed, and asymmetric leverage, is one every major power is wrestling with right now.

Four AI models, including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, are asked whether they are God, and all four decline, several with warnings about deferring to machines without checking their work. The real concern, the essay argues, is not a hostile AI but how much authority we hand over without noticing, and what creators owe the world after building something powerful.

The continuing removals at the Pentagon, the recent resignation of the Army Secretary, and important posts without permanent successors leave me concerned about more than a changed roster. What happens to an institution when the departures keep coming, and why do some of those who know it best remain silent?