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The Journal of Political Readiness was founded in 2026, after the author’s correspondence with the established journals of strategic studies ended, in every case, in rejection — his prior studies, all thirty-one of them, declined unread, in several instances with his name misspelled, and in one instance with a referral to resources the author had not requested and declines to characterize. The fault for this lies entirely with the editors concerned, whose qualifications the author has since reviewed and found wanting. A field this important could not be left to such people. The author therefore built his own journal, as men once built their own boats.

Unlike the publications that would not have him, this journal holds itself to a standard of total verifiability. Every quotation attributed to a public official in these pages is real, was spoken or published in public, and may be checked against transcripts and contemporaneous reporting. The historical program described in Sections II through IV is rendered exactly as the Imperial War Museums describe it. The arithmetic is real arithmetic, performed on the government’s own numbers. The simulations were conducted in Ironman mode. Readers are invited — dared, frankly — to check.

The journal is published as the field requires. At the time of writing it comprises one issue containing one article, which is one more than the field had produced under previous management. The editorial board could not be reached for comment, does not convene, and in the strictest sense does not exist; the author finds this arrangement efficient. The journal’s DOI resolves to Caldwell (1947), the last American scholar to take the subject seriously, in whose lineage this journal stands, and whose own journal, it must be recorded, also would not have the author. The present article was offered nowhere else; the field’s other journals had their chance. Major Yuhan Lim’s article in the China Military Studies Review is real, and remains the only contemporary scholarship the author respects, his own excepted.

The author is, as the biographical note records, a former United States Marine Corps Boot Camp attendee and near-graduate, separated from graduation by eleven training days and a sequence of administrative events that were not his fault and remain under continuing review. He carries the standard regardless. Discipline, lethality, faith: these are not things a man graduates into; they are things a man simply has, whatever the record reflects. Further issues will appear as the field develops — which, the author observes with satisfaction, it is doing. Readers who find the proposal persuasive are invited to subscribe.

Corrections will be considered on their merits, of which the author anticipates few. Complaints, rescinded rejections, and reasonable requests: editor@jpolreadiness.org.