Target Lists, Being "Good Enough," Drone Warfare, & More
Profiles in Preparedness #31
One of the most important—and often overlooked—responsibilities for senior leaders is deciding when a capability is "good enough."
While "good enough" is not a popular opinion, at its core, preparedness is about making investments in time, money, and attention across a portfolio of capabilities.
Every initiative you undertake has trade-offs: focusing too long or too heavily on one program inevitably means neglecting others. There comes a point when continuing to develop a capability no longer delivers equal or greater benefit than the time spent on it.
Knowing when to stop is a critical leadership responsibility because:
Resource allocation is a leader's job. Budget, staff time, and attention are always limited. Leaders must deliberately balance these finite resources across multiple competing priorities.
Objectivity is essential. Preparedness initiatives often involve significant emotional investment. Teams put tremendous effort into building capabilities designed to protect their communities and organizations. Clearly communicating when it's time to pause those efforts—despite the passion involved—is an act of leadership.
You must know what you're aiming for. Without clearly articulated goals at the start of a project, it's nearly impossible to recognize when you've achieved them. Clear markers of success help leaders objectively evaluate inevitable suggestions that "we could do more."
Leadership isn't just knowing what to do. It's recognizing when you've done
Inside The CP Journal
No new articles this week, but we spent some time cleaning up our referral program for subscribers who want to extend their paid subscriptions or earn free access to our Academy and Watch Office.
This Week‘s Reads
Here are a few standout reads from this week with insights, ideas, and perspectives that caught my attention.
Article | The New Kill Chain Starts with a Click. The first of a two-part series on targeted killings that is a must-read for security professionals. In Part 1, Chuck Randolph shows how the attacker in the Minnesota lawmaker assassination utilized data broker services, the modern OSINT threat, to source his target list. In Part 2, "The Kill List is the New Doctrine," he shows how people end up on those lists not because of who they are, but because of what someone believes you represent. As he closes his Part 2, "if we want to prevent what’s next, we’d better start reading [kill lists] for what they are."
Article | Education is Free, Learning is Expensive. Access to information through a college education used to be restricted and exclusive. Today, every bit of information is a click away. Yet because learning is hard and it requires a commitment to become someone new, many people shy away from the discomfort. Yet, that isn't a luxury left of bang organizations and professionals can take. The ability to pay for learning with effort is becoming increasingly important.
Article | America’s drone blind spot and the 9/10 moment we’re ignoring. In the last month, both Ukraine and Israel have provided new proofs of concept of what drones can do in the attack. As this article shows, these should serve as a warning, since America hasn't developed the underlying laws and protections necessary to prevent a similar incident from happening here at home. Because we haven't had an attack within our borders, we are afforded the opportunity to not have to do this in the chaos that accompanies right of bang moments. But only if we take it.
Article | Defense Budgets Need to Fight War and Climate Change, Experts Say. "Water scarcity is contributing to instability in some regions... The melting Arctic is unlocking new maritime routes and spurring a race to control the resources-rich region...Extreme weather events [are] threatening strategic infrastructure and making military operations harder to plan." You don't have to agree with all of the recommendations in this article to recognize the changing operational environment and the sources of global instability.
Article | Key Findings of the 2025 Digital News Report. While a move away from traditional news media and towards social media isn't a surprise, this year's report from Reuters is worth the read. There are pros and cons to an increasingly fragmented news industry. There are plusses and minuses to getting news from social media personalities who make the topics accessible. These dynamics might be here to stay, but the continual recognition that people, companies, and countries are using these dynamics to influence the information we receive, and how we use it, should keep us on our toes.
When You’re Ready
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