When Mike Kelly set up his first few Airbnbs in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 2023, he figured it would be a successful move. It was meant to be an investment project for him and his daughter to work on together. But as more people moved away from bustling and expensive urban centers and landed in the Midwest, their hopes were quickly shattered.
The Fort Wayne housing market boomed. High demand for homes, coupled with the city's low housing stock, has kept costs relatively high — a Redfin analysis of housing data found home prices were up 9.2% in October compared with last year. The hot housing market has translated into higher property taxes, which is throwing off the short-term-rental business model. "The houses we purchased to turn into Airbnbs have been assessed so much higher than what we put into them that we almost can't afford to keep them," Kelly said. "The return on equity wouldn't be as high."
Owners of short-term rentals across the country have faced a similar reality, sharing stories of declining revenues over the past few years as the market was flooded with new rentals. AirDNA, an analytics firm that tracks the short-term-rental market, found that revenue per rental decreased by nearly 2% in 2022 and by more than 8% in 2023 due to an overabundance of units available for rent. AirDNA forecast that revenues would move back into the green in 2024 as the market corrected. But as short-term-rental owners felt signs of an "Airbnbust," some realized they needed to pivot.
On one end of the market, however, it's a different picture. While overall demand for short-term rentals rose just 1.8% in 2023, according to AirDNA's data, demand for stays priced at $1,000 or more increased by nearly 8%. For stays over $1,500, demand jumped 12.5%. In fact, demand for rentals costing over $1,000 a night has increased by 73% since 2019. While cheaper rentals are slowing down, luxury, niche, and themed stays are filling their place. Wealthy vacationers are increasingly going after luxe properties such as a secluded Malibu beach mansion or a modern cabin beset by pristine woods — like something off Cabin Porn. Meanwhile, Airbnb alternatives are jumping into the market to cater to the growing demand. A lust for luxury is propelling the short-term-rental market to new heights.
These complaints, however, tend to focus on rentals on the low end of the market — the $200-a-night stay you might book to visit a family member or get out of town for a weekend. The luxury end of the rental market fills a different role. These spots boast plenty of hotellike amenities — such as contactless check-in, high-speed internet, bathroom toiletries, and coffee makers. Because of the high price point, luxury rentals also tend to standardize their cleaning services. Unlike a hotel room, though, a house or apartment comes with a lot more room to host guests, plus amenities such as a kitchen or private pool. When split between multiple guests for a night or weekend, some of the eye-popping price tags end up being surprisingly affordable.
Among high-income travelers, who made up an increasingly large share of vacationers this year, hotels are on the way out. Deloitte's 2024 summer-travel report found a 17-point drop in people who earn over $200,000 opting to stay at full-service hotels compared with the summer before. While middle-income travelers moved toward budget accommodations like bed and breakfasts and RV rentals, high earners shifted toward private-home rentals.
One brand capitalizing on the growing demand is Wander. Launched in 2022, Wander owns all of its 200 properties, each beautifully designed with stunning landscaping. Its founder and CEO, John Andrew Entwistle, had the idea of making a vacation rental feel like a luxury hospitality brand after a disastrous ordeal renting a cabin in Colorado. "The whole experience felt broken, the type of thing all of us has had at a vacation rental one time or another: The place didn't look like the photos. The beds were uncomfortable. The list goes on and on," he said.
He wanted a rental home with heart and soul, where the building was designed around the landscape and high-speed internet flowed across the house. Wander rentals are often in remote spots to give guests a sense of privacy and quiet. The cleaning service is standardized so guests don't have to worry about cleaning up after themselves, and customers can check in on their own through their smartphones. Every unit, which costs an average of $900 a night, also features sleek workstations for digital nomads.
Other travel brands have found similar success in the luxury market. There's Mint House, a cross between a hotel and short-term rental that has 12 properties across 10 major US cities. Visitor experiences are personalized — for instance, guests can request that the refrigerator be stocked with their favorite groceries before they arrive — and there's 24/7 customer care. The apartments, which can be studios or have multiple bedrooms, are priced similarly to hotels and feature bespoke furniture and decor, along with all the necessities of modern accommodations. To explain the brand's success, Christian Lee, the CEO of Mint House, pointed to the company's ability to provide consistent experiences. "Unlike other short-term listings that lack security and guest care and often require a guest to perform chores at checkout, all of our properties are professionally managed to ensure the utmost safety, security, and cleanliness," he said.
The luxuriousness only goes up from there. Rental Escapes, a full-service luxury-villa-rental company founded in 2012, offers over 5,000 villas in more than 70 destinations worldwide. They start at $500 a night — though most go for tens of thousands. Amase Stays, a collection of $10 million rental estates founded this year, creates bespoke experiences for its top-of-the-line properties, with dedicated concierges who can arrange everything from private chefs and spa services to customized excursions.
Chris Lema, a business coach and product strategist, is a Wander superfan. "These are places that are architecturally beautiful, and the land that they sit on feels like a national park," he said. He likes that the company provides attainable luxury — he's stayed in 13 different Wander locations and hopes to "collect them all," he said. He has even started planning trips around Wander rentals.
"I thought this is where Airbnb was going to go with its business model," he said. "If you go to Airbnb's website now, they have these different categories like 'amazing views' or 'lakefront.' But none of these rentals push forward on the issue of experience. There's the Luxe category — but it's not the same thing."
In Airbnb's Luxe category, homes might cost anywhere between $200 and hundreds of thousands of dollars a night. When the category launched in 2019, an Airbnb press release said the homes would have to pass a slate of design and experience criteria, including higher standards for cleanliness and amenities like towels and toiletries. Unlike at other Airbnb properties, a company representative has to walk through Luxe properties to verify them. Despite that, Lema hasn't been impressed.
"They seem to rank Luxe based on the niceness of the residence," Lema said, "but that isn't really the point of what that kind of experience should be."
An Airbnb spokesperson said, "We're proud to be the only travel platform that offers stays for nearly any desired travel experience." They added: "We're also proud of the growth of our Luxe category supply and look forward to expanding the offering."
So far, Wander's model is working out. It launched with only three locations, and two years later, it has 200 houses and an average occupancy rate of 80%, Entwistle said. By the beginning of 2025, Entwistle hopes to launch locations in Mexico and Canada.
Back in Fort Wayne, Kelly ended up pivoting his Airbnb business to cater to this demand for luxury. "We focus on four-bedroom-plus homes where groups can gather for weddings or reunions," he said. Houses with pools and hot tubs are especially desirable, he's found. Kelly has also amassed a thriving collection of themed Airbnbs. He designed one house to look like the childhood home of the fictional character Fawn Liebowitz from the cult classic film "Animal House." He's working on another rental themed around Indiana University sports teams.
"At the end of the day, the 'luxury' houses are more affordable than staying in multiple hotel rooms," he said. Plus, offering something unique, like a theme, helps homes stand out from the crowd. With the new focus, Kelly's Airbnbs are rarely empty, he said.
Travelers are increasingly wising up to the fact that time — and where, how, and with whom you spend it — is the greatest luxury.
Part of the shifting demand stems from people viewing luxury rentals as a destination unto themselves — if the place you're staying is cool enough, you don't need to get out much. Others are drawn to them as a means to get away from the hubbub. "In today's globalized world, travel destinations have become more and more homogenous and tourist-burdened," Spencer Bailey, the editor of the new book "Design: The Leading Hotels of the World," said. "People are seeking out distinctive experiences away from the crowds and searching for a certain sense of intimacy, craft, and care." It's not just about top-rate service, intricate design, or even a Michelin-starred restaurant. "It's about being in nature, engaging in local culture, and creating discrete, felt experiences that encourage quietness and slowness, not an Instagram moment," Bailey says.
A private rental is often more secluded, meaning travelers can prioritize spending more time alone with their loved ones. "Travelers are increasingly wising up to the fact that time — and where, how, and with whom you spend it — is the greatest luxury," he said. Michelle Steinhardt, the founder of the luxury travel blog The Trav Nav, wrote about her recent stay at a secluded beachfront property rental in Punta Mita, Mexico: "Even though we were only a few minutes from the local town, our party felt like everyone else was miles away."
Increasingly, getting away from home isn't enough. We also want to get away from other people. For those who can afford it — or have enough friends — luxury-travel companies are more than happy to accommodate.
Michelle Mastro covers lifestyle, travel, architecture, and culture.
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Maroon 5 will be visiting major cities across Asia before returning to Vegas to resume their residency in 2025.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation
Maroon 5's Las Vegas residency is on a break, but the band's performances continue on an international scale. Tickets are going fast as concert dates fill up. In addition to securing passes for their festival appearances this year, we've broken down how to buy Maroon 5 tickets for their concert tour below.
Originally formed in 1994, Maroon 5 is celebrating 30 years together as they kicked off their Las Vegas residency in summer at the Dolby Live at Park MGM. The new tour, referred to in shorthand as "M5LV: The Las Vegas Residency," is an extension of their 16-show residency last year.
Maroon 5's residency began on May 17 with the final show taking place in October. Now, the band will do a couple final year-end shows in Florida before beginning the international leg of their tour, visiting major cities across Asia. After eight shows across countries like Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, Maroon 5 will return to the Dolby Live at Park MGM to resume their residency through the spring.
We've got you covered if you're looking for how to get tickets to Maroon 5's concert tour. Here's our breakdown of Maroon 5's residency and tour schedule, purchasing details, and original and resale ticket price comparisons. You can also browse ticket specifics at your leisure on StubHub and Vivid Seats.
Maroon 5 is briefly stepping away from their Las Vegas residency to visit Florida and countries across Asia for the winter and early spring of 2025. They'll return to the Dolby Live in March, currently scheduled to perform eight dates while there.
Below are all of the remaining concert dates for Maroon 5's tour. All concert times are listed in local time zones.
If you're planning to travel for Maroon 5's residency, be sure to check out our roundup of the best Airbnbs in Las Vegas for securing your stay.
How to buy tickets for the Maroon 5 2025 concert tour
You can buy standard original tickets for Maroon 5's 2024 and 2025 concert tour on Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Both their Las Vegas residency and outside tour dates still have options available. However, the quantity of remaining original tickets continues to decrease as each concert date approaches.
Passes to see Maroon 5 in their 2025 concert series are also available for purchase through verified ticket resale sites such as StubHub and Vivid Seats. You may find better luck with more variety in seating availability through these resale vendors.
How much are Maroon 5 tickets?
Maroon 5 tickets for their 2024 concerts are generally less expensive than similar big-name acts on tour this year. Of course, original ticket prices for Maroon 5's 2024 tour vary depending on date, location, and demand for each show.
Maroon 5 is also offering VIP packages for their 2024 concert tour. Their Las Vegas residency dates offer a Premium VIP Banquet package beginning at $495, but these tickets must be sold in multiples of two. The band also offers three VIP packages for their tour dates elsewhere: Diamond Premium Seat (starting at $685), Gold Premium Seat (starting at $435), and Silver Hot Seat (starting at $410).
Who is opening for Maroon 5's tour?
Maroon 5 doesn't have any opening acts for their Las Vegas residency concert dates. The band has not announced any opening acts for their international tour dates.
Will there be international tour dates?
Maroon 5 will be visiting a handful of cities across Asia in 2025. Here are the locations they're set to perform at internationally:
Author Kylie Mohr joined a training group this fall to learn how to set fires.
Courtesy of Kara Karboski
Puffs of smoke rose above a meadow in northeastern Washington as a small test fire danced in the grass a few feet away from me. Pleased by its slow, controlled behavior, my crew members and I, as part of a training program led by the nonprofit organization The Nature Conservancy and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, began to light the rest of the field on fire. The scene had all the trappings of a wildfire — water hoses, fire engines, people in flame-resistant outfits. But we weren't there to fight it; we were there to light it.
It might sound counterintuitive, but prescribed fires, or intentionally lit fires, help lessen fire's destruction. Natural flames sparked by lightning and intentional blazes lit by Indigenous peoples have historically helped clean up excess vegetation that now serves as fuel for the wildfires that regularly threaten people's homes and lives across the West and, increasingly, across the country.
For millennia, lighting fires was common practice in America. But in the mid-to-late 1800s, the US outlawed Indigenous burning practices and started suppressing wildfires, resulting in a massive buildup of flammable brush and trees. That combined with the dry, hot conditions caused by the climate crisis has left much of the country at a dangerously high risk of devastating wildfires. The top 10 most destructive years by acreage burned have all occurred since 2004.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, federal land managers reevaluated their approach to fire and did the first prescribed burns in national parks. We're still making up for lost time: Scientists and land managers say millions more acres of prescribed burns are necessary to keep the country from burning out of control.
But the scale of the task doesn't match that of the labor force, whose focus is often extinguishing fires, not starting them. Responding to the increase in natural disasters has left America with few resources to actually keep them from happening. As Mark Charlton, a prescribed-fire specialist with The Nature Conservancy, told me, "We need more people, and we need more time."
This fall, I outfitted myself in fire-resistant clothing and boots, donned a hard hat, and joined a training program called TREX to better understand how prescribed burns work. TREX hosts collaborative burns to provide training opportunities in the field for people from different employers and backgrounds. The hope is that more people will earn the qualifications they need to lead and participate in burns for the agencies they work for back home.
Our team would walk across the area we planned to burn to collect data on weather and fire behavior.
Courtesy of Kara Karboski
The program's emphasis on learning, coupled with the support of the University of Idaho's Artists-in-Fire Residency (which helped pay my way), is why I, a journalist with no fire jobs on my résumé, could join a prescribed-fire module of about two dozen more experienced participants. I had to pass a fitness test — speed walking three miles with a 45-pound backpack in under 45 minutes — take 40 hours' worth of online coursework, and complete field-operations training to participate as a crew member. While hundreds of people have participated in TREX burns across the country since the program's inception in 2008, the dramatic growth of wildfires is outpacing the number of people being trained to reduce their impact.
The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of forests and grasslands across the country, burning an average of about 1.4 million acres, roughly the size of Delaware, each year with prescribed burns. It burned a record 2 million acres in fiscal 2023. But it's still not enough preparation, considering wildfires have burned over 10 million acres in recent years and people continue building and living in wildfire-prone areas. "It's a huge workload we have, and we know it," said Adam Mendonca, a deputy director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service who oversees the agency's prescribed-fire program. The agency plans to chip away at the problem with the roughly 11,300 wildland firefighters it employs each year who squeeze the work in during the offseason, when there are fewer fires to fight.
But relying on wildland firefighters can be problematic. "We only have those resources for a short time," said Charlton, who served as the incident commander on the Washington burns I joined this fall. "After a long fire season, people are exhausted. It's hard to get people to commit." Plus, wildfires are increasingly overlapping with the ideal windows to do prescribed burns — often the spring and the fall, when conditions are cooler and wetter, making fires easier to tame.
That was especially true this year: Multiple large fires burned across the West into October. These late-season wildfires, coupled with two hurricanes that firefighters helped respond to, strained federal resources. That month, the nation's fire-preparedness level increased to a 5 — the highest level — indicating the country's emergency crews were at their maximum capacity and would've struggled to respond to new incidents.
In response to the elevated preparedness level, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group urged "extreme caution" in executing new prescribed fires, saying backup firefighters or equipment might not be available. "We get to the point where we're competing for resources," said Kyle Lapham, the certified-burner-program manager for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and the burn boss on the Washington burns.
There's also a qualification shortage. Prescribed burns require a well-rounded group with a variety of expertise and positions — including a burn boss, who runs the show and must have years of training. Charlton estimated that hundreds more qualified burn bosses are necessary to tackle nationwide prescribed-burn goals.
A lot of planning — and trained expertise — is required before any burning can begin.
Courtesy of Adam Gebauer
Just as concerning is an interest shortage. The Forest Service has struggled to hire for and maintain its federal firefighting force in recent years, in large part because of poor pay (federal firefighter base pay was raised to $15 an hour in 2022) and other labor disputes over job classifications, pay raises, staffing, and more. The agency is also expecting budget cuts next year and has already said it won't be able to hire its usual seasonal workforce as a result.
Legislation inching its way through Congress could help, though its fate under a new administration is unclear. The National Prescribed Fire Act of 2024 would direct hundreds of millions of dollars to the Forest Service and the US Department of the Interior for prescribed burns, including investment in training a skilled workforce — but it hasn't progressed past a Senate subcommittee hearing in June.
Without a boost in funding, the agency will continue relying heavily on partnerships with nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy and the National Forest Foundation to staff prescribed burns. The Forest Service also recently expanded its Prescribed Fire Training Center to host educational opportunities out West. Critically, though, time is of the essence.
During my TREX training in October, about 20 foresters and firefighters from as far south as Texas and as far north as British Columbia worked beside me. Our group included employees of the Washington Department of Natural Resources and two citizens of the nearby Spokane Tribe of Indians, who have a robust prescribed-fire program of their own.
Over two weeks I got a front-row seat to how much planning (sometimes years) and time a single prescribed burn takes. We conducted several burns in the mountains north of Spokane on the property of a receptive landowner who'd hosted TREX in previous years. He provided the training ground and, in exchange, got work done on his property. This isn't a common scenario — burning on private land can be more complicated, and so more burns happen on state or federal property.
When I arrived, the burn's incident-management team had already put together a burn plan detailing our objectives — reducing wildfire risk to the landowner's house, thinning small tree saplings, knocking down invasive weeds, opening up more wildlife habitat — and the exact weather conditions, like wind speed, relative humidity, and temperature, we needed to safely burn. Prescribed burns on federal lands also go through an environmental review.
At the site, we scouted contained areas we would burn, called units, with trainees making additional plans for how to ignite and control fires. Keeping a fire in its intended location, called "holding," meant lots of prep work, like digging shallow trenches to box the fire in. During the burn, teams monitored smoke and occasionally sprayed the larger trees we wanted to preserve with water when flames threatened their canopies; others poured fuel on the ground, igniting bushes, grass, and smaller trees to slowly build the fire.
Those nights, I went to bed dreaming of smoke. I left with a deeper appreciation for those who set fires for a living.
Courtesy of Kara Karboski
Managing the fire didn't end when we finished burning the 30 or so acres. In some cases, it can involve days of monitoring and cleanup. To make sure the fire was out, my crew and I combed through areas we'd burned the day before for smoke or heat. If we discovered something still smoking, we'd churn up the ground with a shovel or pickax, douse the hot spot with water, and repeat. Just when we thought we were done, we'd find another spot we'd missed.
I went to bed those nights dreaming of little puffs of smoke and woke up with small flakes of ash embedded behind my ears. The work was rewarding and exhausting — I left with a deeper appreciation for the workers who do it for a living.
While every prescribed burn is different, it's always a careful equation. Everything needs to line up: supportive communities, the right weather, and, of course, the workers necessary to plan, burn, and extinguish. Only then can you light the match.
Kylie Mohr is a Montana-based freelance journalist and correspondent for the magazine High Country News.
The author (not pictured) loves working with millennials.
FS Productions/Getty Images/Tetra images RF
I left the workforce years ago because I struggled to connect with baby boomers in the workplace.
As a Gen Xer, I now work with millennials and love it.
Millennial bosses understand that personal issues come up and work can't always come first.
In my early 40s, I did something revolutionary: I got a full-time job.
I'd been self-employed for over a decade, but the siren song of paid benefits was too strong to ignore. Within hours of starting in my new position, it became clear that I was an anomaly. I was one of only two members of my team over the age of 30, and there was an age gap of 10 to 18 years between me and my other seven coworkers.
Much to my relief, every member of that team was happy to teach me the ins and outs of the new job — including the loads of technology I needed to know. They didn't roll their eyes or make under-their-breath comments about old people and computers. They happily showed me the way.
As a Gen Xer, I have worked closely with millennials for over 15 years and with younger bosses for at least half that time. While they have been burdened with a lot of slander, I love working with millennials. They're collaborative and recognize that in helping their coworkers, they're helping achieve communal goals.
I struggled to work with older generations
I realize that no generation is a monolith, and it can be irresponsible to group people together. But we are all shaped by the events that transpire over our lifetimes, particularly those in the forefront during our formative years. So yeah, we have a lot in common with other people born around the same time.
I felt the rift between generations early on in my career. Honestly, it was the success-at-any-cost attitude of the baby boomers that pushed me out of the traditional workforce.
For example, I had one manager who couldn't understand why I didn't want to apply for a promotion. When I told him I needed all my bandwidth to be present for my children, he openly judged me, which affected my career trajectory.
I learned millennials are different
When they were young, millennials were often described as entitled. They were seen as doted on by hyper-involved parents.
But after working closely with them for years, I know that isn't the case. To me, it seems many millennials believe they can create lives they love.
Every younger boss I've had has encouraged me to stay home when I'm not feeling well, to prioritize my family, and to have fun at work. They recognize that my job is not my life but that while I'm in the building, I should be encouraged to do my best and enjoy myself as much as possible.
I once asked one of my favorite millennial bosses about filling out my timesheet. I'd had to miss work because my dog needed emergency vet care. I asked if I should call it a personal day or use vacation time.
"That was a sick day!" she said. "Anything that impacts your health or wellness counts as sick time."
She was the one who told me that volunteering at my children's school would benefit our team; we were working on creating volunteer opportunities for kids, after all. As far as she was concerned, whatever was going on in my life was relevant to work, and anything that interfered with work was a reason to take time off.
The workplace is about to shift again
It's about time we realize, as a culture, that young people are smart and savvy and have a lot to teach the rest of us.
It's funny to watch the rivalry between millennials and Gen Z play out via social media memes; each generation revels in being the young, cool disruptor and eventually has to reckon with being the old, staid boss who's responsible for keeping the machinery running.
This can lead to bitterness and resignation, or it can result in leaders who remember that life is supposed to be enjoyable and work is just work. I think the millennials are in the latter camp, and I'm happy to keep working for them until Gen Z becomes the boss of everything.
The Syrian Democratic Forces, a US partner in Syria, downed an MQ-9 Reaper drone.
The incident shows the SDF has acquired air defenses of some sort.
It's very possible that the SDF downed a low-flying Reaper with a shoulder-fired missile.
America's ally in Syria accidentally shot down an advanced US drone, suggesting these Kurdish-led forces have acquired some kind of air defenses.
A $30 million MQ-9 Reaper drone wasn't the only victim. A day later, the Syrian Democratic Forces — who partnered with the US to fight the Islamic State in Syria a decade ago — purposely shot down a Turkish drone.
A US official confirmed to Defense News that the SDF misidentified the MQ-9 as a threat on December 9 and shot it down, without specifying what kind of weapon was used; the SDF hasn't publicly acknowledged the incident. However, the SDF did release footage purportedly showing its forces shooting down Turkey's Aksungur drone.
"The SDF would need more capable air defense systems than older MANPADs (man-portable air defense system) like the Strela-2 to shoot down an MQ-9 Reaper unless the drone was flying far below its typical operating ceiling, possibly due to mission requirements or technical issues," Freddy Khoueiry, a global security analyst for the Middle East and North Africa at the risk intelligence company RANE, told Business Insider.
A Reaper drone has a 66-foot wingspan and can fly up to 50,000 feet in altitude, beyond the range of shoulder-fired Strela-2 missiles. The remotely piloted aircraft frequently carry Hellfire ground-attack missiles.
"A SHORAD (short-range air defense) or medium-range radar-guided SAM (surface-to-air missile) system would be required to effectively engage a Reaper drone operating at its standard altitude," Khoueiry said.
It is more likely that the SDF has shoulder-fired missiles due to their proliferation, which also have the benefit of being harder to spot than truck-mounted missile launchers. If the MQ-9 was downed by a MANPAD, it suggests it was flying very low, Khoueiry said.
A US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper flew over central New York during a training flight on Oct. 31.
Tech. Sgt. Alexander Rector/US Air Force
The Aksungur is a much larger and more advanced drone than Turkey's widely exported Bayraktar TB2, but it is not in the same league as the American MQ-9.
"Aksungur drones are capable, 'middle-class drones' that are typically used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, although increasingly modified to carry weapons," Nicholas Heras, senior director of strategy and innovation at the New Lines Institute, told BI.
Syrian soldiers abandoned their bases and weapons stockpiles during the dramatic fall of President Bashar al-Assad's regime in early December. Israel has already moved in and bombed large quantities of them. Turkey has also moved to prevent the SDF from capturing weapons. Turkish intelligence destroyed 12 trucks with missiles and other heavy weapons in the northeastern Kurdish city of Qamishli, and Turkish drones targeted abandoned tanks, armored vehicles, and rocket launchers strewn across northeast Syria.
"It is unlikely that the SDF captured and were able to quickly operationalize Syrian regime air defenses within the past week," RANE's Khoueiry said. "Furthermore, Israeli strikes have significantly degraded such systems across Syrian territory, making it even more difficult for a US-backed militia to acquire and effectively operate them."
Turkish media reported earlier this year that US troops in northeast Syria were training the SDF how to use the AN/TWQ-1 Avenger short-range air defense system, which fires Stinger missiles. However, sources in Syria cited by the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said only US troops operate the Avengers, which protect their bases against Iran-backed militia drone attacks.
"The challenge for the SDF to use systems such as the SA-2s (Soviet-made S-75s) or Avengers is that these anti-air systems require a logistical network to operate that is cumbersome for a non-state actor, especially if that non-state actor doesn't have accompanying anti-air capabilities to protect those systems," Heras said.
Ceng Sagnic, chief of analysis of the geopolitical consultancy firm TAM-C Solutions, believes it is possible the SDF is "independently operating" some air defenses in Syria.
"However, it should be noted that Kurdish groups have long had access to short-range air defense missiles, particularly those acquired from the black market and not NATO standard," Sagnic told BI. "There is also a possibility that an operator of one of these systems got lucky that day."
"In any case, the incident demonstrates the readiness of Kurdish groups in Syria to respond to drone operations, especially those conducted by Turkey," Sagnic said.
The Kurdistan Workers Party, commonly known by its PKK acronym, had Strela-2 missiles as far back as the 1990s and shot down two Turkish helicopters over northern Iraq in 1997.
The Middle East Eye news outlet reported earlier this year that Iran had transferred air-breathing anti-drone loitering missiles to the PKK. One such munition purportedly brought down an Aksungur over Iraqi Kurdistan in May. Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen have used the Iranian-made 358 missile to shoot down Israeli and American drones, including a number of MQ-9s.
It's unclear if the SDF — whose main Kurdish component Turkey charges with inextricable PKK links — acquired such a system.
"The claim that Iran supplies the PKK (and, by extension, the SDF) with a significant number of anti-drone missiles is highly questionable," Sagnic said. "Only a consistent pattern of successful anti-drone strikes by the SDF in the near future could indicate enhanced capabilities by the Kurdish group, and a single drone interception is not sufficient proof."
"However, there have been at least two reported interceptions of Turkish drones over northern Iraq in recent months, suggesting that Kurdish groups are adapting to the so-called drone wars, though their continued success remains uncertain."
Paul Iddon is a freelance journalist and columnist who writes about Middle East developments, military affairs, politics, and history. His articles have appeared in a variety of publications focused on the region.
Depop users can buy and sell clothing items on the platform.
Courtesy of Depop
Depop's new gen-AI feature creates item descriptions based on photos that users upload.
The tool has boosted the number of listings on the company's website and saves sellers time.
This article is part of "CXO AI Playbook" — straight talk from business leaders on how they're testing and using AI.
Depop is an online fashion marketplace where users can buy and sell secondhand clothing, accessories, and other products. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in London and has 35 million registered users. It was acquired by Etsy, an online marketplace, in 2021.
Situation analysis: What problem was the company trying to solve?
Depop's business model encourages consumers to "participate in the circular economy rather than buying new," Rafe Colburn, its chief product and technology officer, told Business Insider. However, listing items to sell on the website and finding products to buy take time and effort, which he said can be a barrier to using Depop.
"By reducing that effort, we can make resale more accessible to busy people," he said.
To improve user experience, Depop has unveiled several features powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, including pricing guidance to help sellers list items more quickly and personalized algorithms to help buyers identify trends and receive product recommendations.
In September, Depop launched a description-generation feature using image recognition and generative AI. The tool automatically creates a description for an item once sellers upload a product image to the platform.
"What we've tried to do is make it so that once people have photographed and uploaded their items, very little effort is required to complete their listing," Colburn said. He added that the AI description generator is especially useful for new sellers who aren't as familiar with listing on Depop.
Rafe Colburn is the chief product and technology officer of Depop.
Courtesy of Depop
Key staff and stakeholders
The AI description-generation feature was developed in-house by Depop's data science team, which trained large language models to create it. The team worked closely with product managers.
Colburn said that in 2022, the company moved its data science team from the engineering group to the product side of the business, which has enabled Depop to release features more quickly.
AI in action
To use the description generator, sellers upload an image of the item they want to list to the Depop platform and click a "generate description" button. Using image recognition and gen AI, the system generates a product description and populates item-attribute fields on the listing page, including category, subcategory, color, and brand.
The technology incorporates relevant hashtags and colloquial language to appeal to buyers, Colburn said. "We've done a lot of prompt engineering and fine-tuning to make sure that the tone and style of the descriptions that are generated really fit the norms of Depop," he added.
Sellers can use the generated description as is or adjust it. Even if they modify descriptions, sellers still save time compared to starting with "an empty box to work with," Colburn said.
Did it work, and how did leaders know?
Depop has about 180,000 new listings every day. Since rolling out the AI-powered description generation in September, the company has seen "a real uplift in listings created, listing time, and completeness of listings," Colburn said. However, as the tool was launched recently, a company spokesperson said that specific data was not yet available.
"Aside from the direct user benefits in terms of efficiency and listing quality, we have also really demonstrated to ourselves that users value features that use generative AI to reduce effort on their end," Colburn said.
Ultimately, Depop wants sellers to list more items, and the company's goal is to make it easier to do so, he added. Automating the process with AI means sellers can list items quicker, which Colburn said would create a more robust inventory on the platform, lead to more sales, and boost the secondhand market.
What's next?
Colburn said Depop continues to look for ways to apply AI to address users' needs.
For example, taking high-quality photos of items is another challenge for sellers. It's labor-intensive but important, as listings with multiple high-quality photos of garments are more likely to sell. He said Depop was exploring ways to make this easier and enhance image quality with AI.
A challenge for buyers is sometimes finding items that fit. Depop is also looking into how AI can help shoppers feel more confident that the clothing they purchase will fit so that their overall satisfaction with the platform will be enhanced, Colburn said.
Danish naval patrol vessels monitoring a Chinese bulk carrier suspected of involvement in damaging undersea cables.
MIKKEL BERG PEDERSEN/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images
Undersea cables between Finland-Germany and Lithuania-Sweden were cut, potentially sabotaged.
The incident is one of a number of similar incidents in recent years, highlighting the vulnerability of these lines.
NATO is enhancing surveillance and coordination to protect critical underwater infrastructure.
Last month, an underwater data cable between Finland and Germany and another between Lithuania and Sweden were discovered cut within a day of each other. The damage to the cables, which European officials said appeared deliberate, highlights just how vulnerable these critical undersea lines are.
Yi Peng 3, a Chinese-flagged cargo ship that had departed from Russia's Ust-Luga port in the Gulf of Finland three days before and was tracked loitering near the two locations, is suspected in connection with the incident. It is said to have dragged an anchor over 100 miles, damaging the cables.
China's Yi Peng 3 cargo ship.
Mikkel Berg Pedersen / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP
"No one believes that these cables were accidentally cut," German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said in November. "We have to assume it is sabotage," he added.
In a joint statement with his Finnish counterpart, Pistorius said the damage comes at a time when "our European security is not only under threat from Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors."
As Russia received added scrutiny, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Russian involvement in the incident, saying that "it is quite absurd to continue to blame Russia for everything without any reason."
Critical but vulnerable
In recent years, a string of incidents involving damage to underwater infrastructure has occurred, many of them in the same region.
Last year, Newnew Polar Bear, another Chinese cargo ship, damaged a gas pipeline running between Estonia and Finland. China's investigation concluded the damage was accidental; however, Estonia and Finland's investigation is still ongoing.
In 2022, a Norwegian underwater data cable was damaged, and there were indications of human involvement in that incident. In 2021, a 2.5-mile-long section of another data cable disappeared from waters north of Norway.
The incident that received the most attention, though, was the sabotage of the Nord Steam gas pipelines between Russia and Germany in September 2022. There have been indications that Ukrainian elements might have been behind the sabotage, but this has not been confirmed.
The Nord Stream pipeline leak.
Danish Defence Command
Underwater infrastructure is increasingly critical to modern life. The vast majority of internet traffic passes through underwater fiber-optics cables, and underwater energy pipelines are common in many regions. But protecting this infrastructure, which can stretch for hundreds or thousands of miles, is difficult.
"There's no way that we can have NATO presence alone all these thousands of kilometers of undersea, offshore infrastructure," then-NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg said in 2023. Yet, NATO can be better at collecting and sharing information and intelligence "and connecting the dots," he added.
Indeed, NATO and the European Union are trying to do that.
In May this year, NATO held its first Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network meeting and launched its Maritime Centre for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure to better coordinate the capabilities of its members and increase collaboration between them.
Further, the EU is funding several initiatives to develop uncrewed surface and underwater systems to surveil critical areas and detect threats early.
But there are also legal difficulties to protecting underwater infrastructure, as it usually traverses the territorial waters of several countries and can also pass through international waters.
The usual suspects
Although it can often be difficult to establish a culprit whenever such infrastructure is damaged, officials have pointed out that Russian activity near underwater cables has intensified.
In 2017, the US admiral in charge of NATO's submarine forces said the alliance was "seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don't believe we have ever seen."
The war in Ukraine has added another dimension to this matter.
"There are heightened concerns that Russia may target undersea cables and other critical infrastructure in an effort to disrupt Western life, to gain leverage against those nations that are providing security to Ukraine," David Cattler, NATO's intelligence chief, said last year.
British Royal Navy warship HMS Diamond shadowing the Russian spy ship Yantar.
LPhot Kyle Heller/UK MOD
Russia has developed a number of underwater capabilities and has a specialized unit, the Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research, committed to the task.
GUGI, as the operation is also known, is an elite Russian unit that employs specialized surface and underwater vessels capable of underwater sabotage and surveillance. Yantar, one of GUGI's special-purpose spy vessels, which nominally acts as a survey vessel, has often been spotted near underwater cables.
Furthermore, a joint investigation released in 2023 by the public broadcasters of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland discovered that Russia, over the past decade, employed a fleet of 50 boats — masking as research or commercial vessels — to gather intelligence on allied underwater cables and wind farms in the Nordic region.
"When you look at the evidence of their activities now, the places they are doing surveys, overlaid with this critical undersea infrastructure … you can see that they are at least signaling that they have the intent and the capability to take action in this domain if they choose," Cattler said.
The author (not pictured) moved out of London and to a small seaside town.
AzmanJaka & Dave Curtis/Getty Images
After years of being a lawyer, I suddenly became burned out and lonely.
I decided to quit my job, leave London, and move to a small town in the UK.
At first, the change was difficult, but now I know I'm in the right place.
I never understood the concept of burnout at work. For me, the key to success in the rat race was simple: If you're hungry enough, you will endure; you can't possibly get tired of doing your job if you are tough enough.
Well, that was the case until I burned out.
Twelve years of studying law and working as an attorney in Mexico, the US, and the UK had taken their toll. After years of working in London in a fast-paced environment at a law firm, I reached my limit and broke down.
When I reached rock bottom, I decided to make a drastic change and move out of London.
I quit to prioritize mental health over money and glory
One day, I woke up feeling lonely, exhausted, anxious, and lost — with my life solely defined by my career.
I knew it was time to do something about it, so I left my high-power law firm. The hardest part of quitting wasn't the uncertainty of what the future held but saying goodbye to a high-paying job — especially in a city like London, where the cost of living is high. But at a certain point, money wasn't enough to keep me there.
I started therapy and a rigorous exercise regimen. I needed to make myself stronger and healthier. It wasn't easy, but in the end, those things empowered me and gave me the clarity I needed to end the toxic relationship I had with my job and finally have a fresh start somewhere else.
I had to leave the big city
Staying in London was never an option; it was too expensive to sustain myself financially and too chaotic to clear my head and find peace. I needed nature to reconnect with myself.
After some research, I discovered the perfect place: Eastbourne. It's a small seaside town connected to London by direct train, next to a couple of hiking trails, with more sun than the rest of the UK, and with enough coffee shops to keep me caffeinated.
I moved as soon as I could. The first weeks were rough as I learned the main difference between a big city and a small town: Life is slow— in every possible way. At first, I was desperate and annoyed, but after a couple of days, I understood there was no need to do things quickly. Things are better enjoyed when you take the time to acknowledge them.
One of the best things about small-town life is the sense of community. Everyone in Eastbourne knows each other and welcomes you as if you were family. Inspired by this sense of community, I decided to immerse myself fully. I joined the local rowing club and a volunteer group.
On the professional side of things, I struck a balance between my work and personal life. I took the necessary number of deals and clients to earn a living and also have a moment for myself every day. The balance is what keeps me happy and healthy.
I'm happy for the time being
I know that nothing is permanent, so I'm not sure how long I'll last in this small resort town.
I just know that I have never felt better physically, mentally, and spiritually. I found peace and also some time to embrace my artistic side. I don't miss the old days at all.
But this tranquil existence in Eastbourne may not endure indefinitely. I reckon that at some point, I will need to take more action in my daily life, but for the time being, it has been the best decision I've ever made.
Israel's prime minister justified its attack on Syrian missile corvettes and other remnants of the Assad regime's military by invoking a pre-emptive strike during World War II.
AAREF WATAD/AFP via Getty Images
Israel invoked a WWII precedent in trying to justify its pre-emptive strikes in Syria.
During WWII, the Royal Navy attacked the fleet of its former ally to keep it from Nazi control.
Both operations were borne in atmospheres of fear and crisis.
When Israel sank six Syrian warships at the port of Latakia this week amid larger attacks on the military remnants of the ousted Assad regime, Israel's leader invoked a precedent from World War II.
"This is similar to what the British Air Force did when it bombed the fleet of the Vichy regime, which was cooperating with the Nazis, so that it would not fall into the Nazis' hands," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Though Netanyahu's history was faulty — it was the Royal Navy rather than the RAF that struck the French fleet — his analogy was revealing. The attack on the port of Mers-el-Kebir on July 3, 1940, has gone down as either a courageous decision that saved Britain — or a treacherous and needless backstab of an ally.
At the least, it is one of Britain's most controversial decisions of the Second World War. Like Israel today, the British acted amid an atmosphere of crisis, haste and uncertainty. The Israeli goal is to keep the now-deposed Syrian government's huge arsenal — which includes chemical weapons and ballistic missiles — from falling into the hands of rebel groups, which are dominated by Islamic militants. For Britain, the goal was to keep Adolf Hitler's hands off the French fleet, the fourth-largest navy in the world in 1940.
In that chaotic summer of 1940, the situation looked grim. The German blitzkrieg had just conquered France and Western Europe, while the cream of the British Army had barely been evacuated — minus their equipment — from Dunkirk. If the Germans could launch an amphibious assault across the English Channel, the British Army was in no condition to repel them.
However, Operation Sealion — the Nazi German plan to invade Britain — had its own problems. The Kriegsmarine — the German Navy — was a fraction of the size of the Royal Navy, and thus too small to escort vulnerable troop transports. But Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill had to contemplate a situation he had never expected: a combined German-French battlefleet.
Technically, France had only agreed to an armistice — a permanent cease-fire — with Germany rather than surrender. France would be divided between German-occupied northern zone, and a nominally independent rump state of Vichy comprising southern France and the colonies of the French Empire. Vichy France would be allowed a meager army, and the French Navy would be confined to its home ports.
The British didn't trust French promises that its ships would be scuttled if the Germans tried to seize them. Why had France signed a separate peace with Germany after earlier pledging not to? Why didn't the French government choose to go into exile, and continue the war from its North African colonies as the British urged? London was well aware that the right-wing Vichy government — under Field Marshal Philippe Pétain, hero of the First World War — had more affection for the Third Reich than it did for Britain. With Germany master of Europe, Pétain sneered that Britain would soon "have its neck wrung like a chicken."
The Royal Navy struck French warships at Mers-el-Kebir in French Algeria on July 3, 1940.
Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
After Vichy rebuffed pleas to send the fleet to British ports, Churchill and his ministers decided the risk was too great. In late June 1940, the Royal Navy received orders for Operation Catapult. A task force — including the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and three battleships and battlecruisers — would be dispatched to the French naval base at Mers-el-Kebir, near the Algerian port of Oran. A powerful French squadron of four battleships and six destroyers were docked there, including the new battleships Dunkerque and Strasbourg.
The French were to be given six hours to respond to an ultimatum: sail their ships to British ports and fight the Germans, sail them to French Caribbean ports and sit out the war, demilitarize their ships at Mers-el-Kebir, or scuttle their vessels. When the local French commander tried to delay while summoning reinforcements, the British opened fire.
The ensuing battle was not the Royal Navy's most glorious. Caught in every admiral's nightmare — unprepared ships anchored in port — the French were simply smothered by British gunfire. The battleship Bretagne and two destroyers were sunk, two other battleships damaged, and 1,297 French sailors perished. The British suffered two dead.
This was no repeat of the Battle of Trafalgar, when the Royal Navy smashed a Franco-Spanish fleet off Spain in 1805. Most ships at Mers-el-Kebir were damaged rather than sunk, and the French fleet quickly relocated its scattered vessels to the heavily defended French port at Toulon (where they were scuttled in November 1942 when German troops occupied Vichy). Though Vichy didn't declare war on Britain — and only retaliated with a few minor attacks on British bases — it confirmed old French prejudices about British treachery and "perfidious Albion."
Britain's attack on Mers-el-Kebir was political as much as military. In the summer of 1940, many people — including some in the United States — believed that the British would be conquered or compelled to make peace with a victorious Germany. Churchill argued that Britain had to show its resolve to keep on fighting, not least if it hoped to persuade America to send tanks, ships and war materials via a Lend-Lease deal. Attacking a former ally may have been a demonstration of British resolve.
Israel's situation does not resemble that of Britain in 1940. Syria has never been an ally of Israel. The two nations have had an armistice since 1949, punctuated by multiple wars and clashes over the years. Britain acted out of a sense of weakness, while Israel is confident enough of its strength to hit targets in Syria.
Yet by citing Mers-el-Kebir as a precedent, Netanyahu proved a golden rule of international relations that applied in 1940 and still applies today: Nations always act in their own interests. Faced with a choice between respecting a former ally and defending Britain from invasion, Churchill chose the latter. Netanyahu didn't hesitate to do the same.
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
The Red Duchess, as she was known, planned for her lover, not her three children, to inherit the archive she tended for much of her life.
Nate Sweitzer for BI
In 2019, Leoncio Alonso González de Gregorio y Álvarez de Toledo, the 22nd Duke of Medina Sidonia, stormed into his late mother's palace on the Andalusian coast of Spain.
In a video he posted on YouTube marking the occasion, the Duke, tall and silver-haired, strides triumphantly through the Ambassador Room — a grand hall nearly 33 yards long, lined with oil paintings by the likes of Velázquez's master, Francisco Pacheco. In happier times, the room had been used for receiving dignitaries who visited the Duke's mother, Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo. Celebrated as the "Red Duchess," Luisa Isabel was a socialist-minded, fascism-battling aristocrat beloved by ordinary Spaniards. But now, 11 years after she had cut Leonicio and his siblings out of their inheritance, the Duke had arrived at the palace to lay claim to a national treasure he considered his by birthright.
"At last, I'm at home after many decades away," Leoncio proclaims in the video.
The treasure, known as the Archive of Medina-Sidonia, was housed in the palace's attic. A collection of 6 million documents, it spans nearly a millennium of Spanish imperial history. Within its pages lie the secrets of the kings, dukes, and explorers of medieval Spain. Luisa Isabel, who had spent the last two decades of her life cataloging the archive, believed it proved that Arab Andalusians, not Christopher Columbus, had discovered America. Perhaps the most important privately held archive in Europe, it is valued at over $60 million, though historians who have studied it consider it priceless.
Luisa Isabel, who'd been imprisoned under the regime of dictator Francisco Franco, believed the archive should pass to the people. "I have inherited this legacy, which is legally mine," she once declared. "But morally, it belongs to everyone." In her will, Luisa Isabel left only 743,000 euros to Leoncio and his siblings, Pilar and Gabriel. The bulk of the estate — including the archives — would be controlled by Liliane Dahlmann, Luisa Isabel's lover and longtime secretary, whom the Duchess had married on her deathbed.
The fight over the priceless archive — one of Europe's most important private collections — has been "the stuff of nightmares."
What ensued was a bitter legal battle that would shatter the family, captivate Spanish society, and throw the fate of the archive into doubt. Leoncio's homecoming video was a declaration of war. Flouting a court ruling that barred him and his siblings from living in the palace, he had decided to move back into his ancestral home — even though it was legally occupied by Liliane, his mother's widow. "There's a lot of tension," says Gabriel, the black sheep of the family. "They barely talk to one another, enter and leave through separate doors, and rarely bump into one another." To drive home his disputed claim, Leoncio made a point of interrupting weekly palace tours. "Welcome to my house!" he would greet groups of startled tourists. "Here, they only manipulate the truth."
Liliane, ensconced upstairs with the archive she had been charged with safeguarding, kept her silence. At times it must have seemed that the family's inheritance, passed down through the generations and now entrusted to her care, was cursed. "Sometimes you don't choose your destiny, it chooses you," she once said. "Personally, these past few years have been exceedingly difficult — the stuff of nightmares."
The family appeared to start off happily enough. In 1955, only 18 years old and already pregnant with Leoncio, Luisa Isabel married José Leoncio González de Gregorio, a nobleman from Soria. Photographs from the time show the new Duchess smiling in a black ankle-length dress, her long hair framing her tiny face and her lips brightened with lipstick. Standing beside her, José Leoncio appears tall, athletic, and handsome.
In reality, Luisa Isabel and José Leoncio couldn't have made a more ill-suited couple. Her ancestors had commanded Spanish armadas, served as prime minister, and owned vast swathes of southern Spain. Her parents had fled the country during the Spanish Civil War. Her new husband, by contrast, was a die-hard conservative who supported Franco's dictatorship. Luisa Isabel loved the night life. José Leoncio, a man of the countryside, disliked high society nearly as much as the radical ideals that would soon claim his wife.
During their brief union, the couple had three children in quick succession: Leoncio in 1956, Pilar in 1957, and Gabriel in 1958. But the Duchess never seemed to take to the role of mother. After giving birth to Gabriel, family lore has it that she handed him to the nurses and declared she had fulfilled her role as a woman. The moment also marked the end of her marriage. Within the year, she had separated from José Leoncio and began to spend long stretches in Paris, where she mingled with Simone de Beauvoir and other leading intellectuals. Her children remained behind in Madrid, where they were left in the care of Luisa Isabel's grandmother. "She rarely came to visit," Gabriel recalls.
One day, when Gabriel was 6 or 7, his mother appeared at the door. Gone were her elegant dresses and long hair. Wafer thin, Luisa Isabel now sported men's trousers and short-cropped hair. There were rumors she was sleeping with women. "Someone in the household said she was our mother," Gabriel recalls. "But for us, she looked like the boy who worked at the local grocery." Leoncio was distraught. "You're not my mother!" he cried.
The change in Luisa Isabel ran deeper than fashion. In 1964, the Duchess led a protest march of fishermen in Sanlúcar. Her noble pedigree gave her a measure of protection to speak out against Franco. "This privileged aristocrat had a rebellious spirit," as one newspaper put it. Her reputation was further cemented in 1967, when she stood up for a group of protesters whose homes had been rendered radioactive after an American nuclear bomber crashed over the small fishing village of Palomares. The protesters, she told soldiers dispatched by the regime, "are here only for justice, and they are here with me." She then led the group to a bar at the village's main square for a round of cold beers.
Despite her noble pedigree, the Duchess was imprisoned for speaking out against Franco.
Nate Sweitzer for BI
Arrested and thrown in prison for a year, the Duchess kept up the fight from her miserable, rat-infested cell. She wrote letters and articles denouncing the conditions in Spanish prisons. A novel she authored about suffering farm workers called "The Strike," which she had managed to smuggle into France, prompted the government to threaten her with a 10-year sentencefor slander. In April 1970, a few months after her release, the Duchess escaped to France disguised as a man. "I remember putting the hat and the mustache on her," recalls Julia Franco, a longtime family employee.
During her exile, José Leoncio seized on her political dissidence to secure custody of the children. "The role of being a mother slipped away from her," Pilar recalls. According to Gabriel, he and his siblings were at their father's mercy. "He was determined to redirect our lives, banning the staff from passing her calls or letters on to us," he says. The children, by birth, were nobility. But their lives felt anything but noble.
"The Red Duchess Returns" blared a headline in El Pais, a national newspaper, in 1976. Franco had died, paving the way for Spain's first open elections in four decades and the safe return of Spanish dissidents. Luisa Isabel moved into the palace at Sanlúcar, where she held court each evening surrounded by famous actors, foreign journalists, and celebrated academics. No longer closeted about her sexuality, she came across like a Spanish version of Sid Vicious. "She was punky, with short, spiky hair and worn-out clothing," recalls Miguel "El Capi" Arenas, who lived with the Duchess in the early 1980s.
By day, Luisa Isabel devoted herself to organizing the archives. Often rising at 6 in the morning, she would sequester herself in the attic among stacks of dusty documents, chain-smoking cigarettes — two packs a day — and barely eating. She spent years cataloging the papers in jaundiced folders, tying them up with string and developing a knack for deciphering their Gothic cursive handwriting, with all its loops and ligatures. Establishing herself as an amateur historian, she published a dozen books, including "It Wasn't Us," her reappraisal of Columbus published on the 500th anniversary of his arrival in America. Historians came to admire her patience and diligence. "She did a magnificent job with very few resources," says Juan Luis Albentosa, chief archivist of the Franciscan Library in Murcia. "She had no state support back then, nor any formal training."
The Duchess had first encountered the papers in the late 1950s in a storage tunnel at her family home in Madrid and transported them to the palace in Sanlúcar in the back of a lorry. While it wasn't unusual for noble families to maintain private archives, this one encompassed the unwritten history of Spain itself. The archive contained not only the records of various aristocratic families, but also receipts signed by the painter Diego Velázquez, primary sources about the Spanish Armada, and municipal records from Palos de la Frontera, the village from which Columbus set sail in 1492.
“I couldn’t get the Duchess alone, ever," says her daughter, Pilar. "Liliane was always in her ear, trying to make us look bad.”
The Duchess both embraced and defied her status as an aristocrat. She believed the Archive of Medina-Sidonia belonged to the public — but only after she was no longer alive to claim it. "She was a traditionalist," her nephew, Alfonso Maura, tells me. "How could she spend all those years working on the family archives and not be?" Andres Martinez, a historian and friend of the Duchess, casts her contradictory nature in more poetic terms. "You can't jump out of your own shadow," he says.
As Luisa Isabel devoted her days to the archive and her nights to her soirees, her children saw her only occasionally. To the Duchess, they were reminders of their father — and of the world of entitlement she had devoted her life to rejecting. In 1977, a year after her return to Spain, she wrote to the director general of the Spanish National Heritage Board to request that the palace and its contents, including the archives, be registered as protected public goods, to "prevent losing what belongs to everyone."
"My family's wealth isn't important, and my children don't seem interested in preserving our artistic heritage, although they enjoy it," she wrote. By the following year, the request had been granted. The most important and valuable asset of Medina-Sidonia's ancestral heritage was now under the protection of the state.
In Gabriel's view, "the moment that marked our disunion" occurred in 1982 — the day Leoncio married his first wife, a Catalonian aristocrat named María Montserrat Viñamata y Martorell. It was at the wedding that Liliane Dahlmann, one of the bridesmaids, entered Luisa Isabel's life.
The Duchess noticed Liliane immediately. Tall and blonde and 20 years Luisa Isabel's junior, Liliane had moved from Germany to Barcelona as a girl. "I'll make her mine," the Duchess told her friend Capi Arenas during the reception. Julia Franco, who was also in attendance, recalls that the Duchess and Liliane "couldn't take their eyes off each other."
Before long, Liliane had moved into the palace, where she served as Luisa Isabel's secretary. The relationship mellowed the Duchess. Gone were the wild parties and the bohemian friends crashing at the palace for months on end; Luisa Isabel became quieter and more dedicated to the archives. "They were always together," her friend Andres Martinez recalls. "I couldn't get the Duchess alone, ever." Luisa Isabel's children were also suspicious. "Liliane was always in my mother's ear, trying to make us look bad," Pillar says.
“I’ve been at cafés with Gabriel," one friend observed. "And suddenly he’ll just start talking to someone he barely knows about his quarrels with his mother.”
The children also began to fight among themselves. As the eldest, Leoncio had a role in deciding which family titles went to whom. Gabriel claims they had an understanding that he would be named Duke of Montalto and Aragon, and that Leoncio had changed his mind.
"I'm inclined to stop the progressive scattering of our family titles," Leoncio wrote in a letter to his brother, rationalizing the decision. Since the family could no longer claim economic or political power, he said, "moral and historical integrity is all we have left."
Pilar was next. In 1993, King Juan Carlos I had named her Duchess of Fernandina. Now, Leoncio maintained that the title should have gone to his son. He launched a battle in the Spanish courts, stripping his sister of her noble name and privileges.
Leoncio also squabbled with his mother over the estate of her grandmother, who had left the children an inheritance "worth millions of euros," according to Gabriel. But as the estate's administrator, the Duchess had spent much of the money. In a letter to his mother, Leoncio protested this "robbery," complaining that he had received no financial help after his marriage and the birth of his son. He barely mentioned Pilar and Gabriel. The Duchess, in a scathing reply, denounced Leoncio as "weaker" than she had "ever imagined."
Gabriel had considered himself and Leoncio thick as thieves; they had lived together during their university days in Madrid and always looked after each other. Now, he felt that Leoncio was only looking out for himself. Pilar agreed. "My older brother tried to keep everything for himself and push us out," she says.
Gabriel and Pilar took the nuclear option. In 1989, they successfully sued their mother over the misspent money. In retaliation, the Duchess banned them from the palace.
Over the ensuing years, the Duchess sold off various tracts of land and other assets, reinvesting the money in the palace, and took steps to ensure that none of the children would have any power over the archives.In 1990, she transferred ownership of the palace and the archives to a new organization she founded, the Casa Medina Sidonia Foundation. And in 2005, she amended the foundation's statutes to ensure that, upon her death, Liliane would take over as president.
Three years later, on the night the Duchess died — March 7, 2008 — mourners filled the Salon of Columns, a vast room in the palace crafted by American artisans provided to the family by the 16th-century conquistador Hernán Cortés. Gabriel arrived at around 10 o'clock at night. At age 50, he and his mother hadn't spoken in 20 years. Leoncio and Pilar were already there. The greetings between them were civil but not warm.
There were whispers about how the Duchess had carried out one final snub of her children. Just 11 hours before her death, she had married Liliane in a civil ceremony. Details of the wedding were hush-hush, but it granted Liliane legal control of the palace — and the archives.
Gabriel had arrived at the palacewith a somewhat macabre mission in mind. He'd brought a camera with him, and he planned to capture an image of his mother's corpse, just as he'd done when his father had died a month earlier. He wasn't sure where this impulse came from. Perhaps, after years of animosity and neglect, he wanted proof his parents were really gone for good.
Stepping away from the mourners, Gabriel entered the room where the Duchess lay in a casket. She was "deteriorated, stiff," he recalls. He felt no despair, no sense of grief. He took the camera from his pocket and held it over her body. As he did, others in the room protested. Gabriel took the picture anyway. "He had the right to take a photo of her," says his friend Íñigo Ramírez de Haro, an author and playwright who accompanied Gabriel that night. "He was her son, after all."
The night the Duchess died, her sons devolved into a fight over a photograph Gabriel took of her body.
Nate Sweitzer for BI
Alerted to what was happening, Leoncio suddenly appeared and began chasing his brother around the room. "He asked me to delete the photo," Gabriel recalls. It was a regression to youth, two middle-aged men sparring like adolescents in their mother's grand house. It was also a sign of the quarrels to come.
At first, the siblings worked in concert to challenge their mother's will. In court, they cited a provision of Spanish law mandating that a person's descendants have a right to two-thirds of an estate, regardless of the deceased's wishes. "I'm not surprised by any of this," Gabriel told a reporter at the time. "My mother made it clear that she was going to fuck us."
The court agreed. By transferring the vast majority of her wealth — the palace and its contents, including the archives — to the foundation, the Duchess had exceeded the portion of her estate she was legally allowed to bequeath to non-heirs. The foundation was ordered to pay 27 million euros to the children as compensation. There was only one problem: The foundation had nowhere near that much money, and, as a national heritage site, none of it could be sold.
To further complicate matters, Leoncio wasn't satisfied with the ruling. He was after something more than money. As duke, he believed he should be responsible for the palace, the archives, and the family legacy. "Leoncio Alonso wasn't happy with this solution because it meant giving up his family's property, and he didn't want to be remembered as the first Duke of Medina Sidonia to allow this," Eduardo Ferreiro, Leoncio's lawyer, said at the time.
Leoncio appealed the ruling and won. But the victory proved pyrrhic. The higher court ruled that he and his siblings would become part owners of the palace and its treasures — though without any power over its administration, any right to distribute its contents, or any privilege to reside there. Liliane, the court added, could continue to live in the palace. The siblings were effectively owners of everything, and of nothing.
Infuriated, Leoncio decided to defy the court's ruling and take matters into his own hands. He moved into the palace, effectively becoming housemates with his mother's widow. "Cohabitation is uncomfortable," he told a reporter. "However, the house is big."
Things got messy, fast. A newspaper reported that Montserrat Viñamata, Leoncio's first wife, had become romantically involved with Liliane, whom she had known since their university days in Barcelona. Viñamata denied the rumor: "Whoever has insinuated this has done me a lot of damage," she told a local newspaper.
In 2023, Leoncio ratcheted up the dispute. He accused Liliane of taking money from his mother's estate. Liliane denied the charge, arguing that Leoncio was smearing her name in an effort to remove her as president of the foundation so he could take over in her place. Both of them declined requests to speak with me.
Earlier this year, a judge found Liliane guilty of misappropriating funds. She was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to repay 280,000 euros. Her appeal is due to be heard by Spain's supreme court.
On a hot morning last summer, I sit down with Gabriel at a busy café terrace in Madrid. Dressed in navy blue shorts and a white polo shirt, collar up, he looks every inch the aristocrat. Slim, with wavy gray hair, he's the kind of well-read man who sprinkles his conversations with quotes from the French economist Thomas Piketty. He also takes after his mother. It's as if his obsession with her betrayal has so boiled within him that it now emanates from his very physicality. He has her rosy cheeks, her birdish eyes, her same stubborn drive.
Gabriel, divorced and childless, seems caught in a perpetual struggle to find his place in the world. He has a habit of talking in circles, though he always returns to the topic of how his family has been torn apart. "I've been at cafés with him," says a close family member, "and suddenly he'll just start talking to someone he barely knows about his quarrels with his mother."
His mother, he tells me, "never wanted to have any relationship with us. Above all, she saw us as a threat to the free disposal of her wealth." He claims he wants to mediate between his siblings and Liliane. "I see the foundation as running like a business," he says. "What interests me is that it's run well, not who runs it." But even those closest to him have trouble discerning his true intentions. "Gabriel's views on all this change — depending on how he wakes up in the morning," says his good friend and lawyer, Javier Timmermans.
Pilar, for her part, sees the family drama as integral to both brothers' emotional makeup. Gabriel "seems to be searching for headlines rather than solutions," she says, while Leoncio is "just interested in defending his claims" as the first-born son.
As Liliane and Leoncio battle for control of the archives, they continue to share the palace. "There's a lot of tension," observes Gabriel. "They barely talk to one another."
Nate Sweitzer for BI
Pilar, a writer and a socialite, inherited her mother's flair for culture: One paper called her "possibly the most elegant woman in Spanish high society." If her brothers remain bent on getting justice, she's more interested in closure. "All that sensationalism doesn't matter," she says. "That might be fine for making a soap opera if they want, but solving the archives issue doesn't have to depend on that."
Pilar is the first to admit that she has good reason to seek a settlement. She has inherited her father's residence in central Spain, the González de Gregorio Palace, and she has taken to referring to it as her vampire because it sucks up all her money. "I would be lying if I said I didn't want to resolve this situation because I need to," she says.
Unfortunately for Pilar and her brothers, their father's estate is proving every bit as thorny as their mother's. A half-sister whom their father never recognized has come forward to demand a share of his estate, using the same provision of Spanish inheritance law that they themselves deployed against the foundation. In October, a court ordered Pilar and her brothers to pay the half-sister a sum of more than $1 million. Gabriel now fears they might be forced to auction off the rights to the archive to private bidders — a desperate measure to cover their spiraling debts. If that were to happen, the children would finally be separated from the archive, just as the Duchess had wanted.
A few months after meeting with Gabriel, I travel to Sanlúcar de Barrameda to see the Archive of Medina Sidonia for myself.
Walking through a labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets in the city center, I pass rows of simple white houses. Some of the facades are crumbling like stale bread; others are as pristine as a Hollywood smile. The whitewashed palace looms above the city, just as the family's thousand-year legacy has loomed over the children for their entire lives.
Past the sprawling Ambassador's Room where the Duke had filmed his triumphant return, I climb a flight of stairs to the attic. The Investigator's Room smells sweet and woody. A faint chill hangs in the air, and bright sunlight casts shadows across the high shelves lined with books. There I find Liliane, quietly tapping away on her laptop.
In an email to me, Liliane had accepted my request to visit the archive, but said she wouldn't comment on any legal matters, citing past experiences when she felt her words had been twisted. Her position on the archive, echoing that of the late Duchess, is that it belongs in public hands. "They are the only ones who, today, can guarantee its maintenance and preservation, as required in a technological world," she wrote, adding that "knowledge of the past is indispensable for moving forward in all aspects of human life."
True to her word, Liliane sits at the table beside me in silence while I study the archive. Afterseveral hours, she abruptly leaves without uttering a word.
I'm handed an accountant's ledger, which indexes the documents in the archive, the descriptions scribbled in the margins in the Duchess's spidery handwriting. I ask for a diary of the Almadraba — the famous local fishing season held every May for the past 3,000 years. The diary dates back to 1550, comprising a nearly indecipherable tabulation of the number of fish caught, and the money made in each village.
Sitting with the nearly 500-year-old document in the dim light of the library, I'm reminded that only a tiny part of the collection has been digitized. The history it contains is almost entirely physical. A fire, or a robbery, could cause the documents to disappear forever.
The most viable resolution is for either the state or a major cultural institution to step in and buy the estate from the siblings, turning it into a state-owned asset and ensuring the proper management and preservation of the archives. But that would cost a lot of money — and thanks to the Duchess, the government already has a role in the foundation's administration, providing resources and guidance. And so the feud rages on, with the children clinging to the legacy their mother never wanted them to have. Leoncio and Liliane continue to live in separate wings of the palace, each imprisoned by the limbo to which Spanish law, and their intertwined fate, have condemned them. Gabriel remains consumed by his vendetta against their mother, and Pilar remains locked in battle with the rest of the family. The Duchess, with her relentless dedication to the archive and her disregard for her own children, left them with an acrimonious and bitter future. They had succeeded at gaining part ownership of her estate. But what they'd won seems more like a share in her disdain.
The author (not pictured) is a manager who had to rethink his management style.
Nathaphat/Getty Images/iStockphoto
People are changing jobs quicker these days, so I lost a new hire during the onboarding process.
It made me rethink my management style, specifically with new hires.
I now ensure all new employees have personalized onboarding plans and have one clear goal.
For hiring managers, this is a story as old as time: You find a candidate you like, hire them, and build out their onboarding plan. They're prepared to start attending client meetings and managing their workload. And then boom — they find a better offer and leave within a few weeks or months.
Accelerated job changes aren't new. Gallup reports that millennials are the most likely generation to seek a career change and that six out of 10 millennials are open to new jobs.
The reality is that, as managers, we're competing with a complicated, changing, and competitive job market.
I learned this firsthand as a manager in the public relations and communications industry. This year, I onboarded a new hire and then tried to manage their abrupt departure. It challenged a few assumptions I made about a new employee and what success looks like.
For many of us working in more structured industries, there's typically an onboarding plan for new hires. They're typically given training and a checklist to complete in a certain amount of time. Those in more corporate and bureaucratic companies know this well.
Things like 30-60-90 plans or SMART goals can feel almost endless to a new hire.
A process and plan are important, but managing the person is crucial to a new hire's early success.
Like a sports coach or trainer would develop a plan based on their individual players, I think our jobs as managers and employers would be made easier by treating new hires in the same manner. Every new employee will bring different attributes, attitudes, and personalities. Onboarding plans should be better shaped for each employee — not the other way around.
Set an achievable goal early on
The ambiguity of onboarding can feel overwhelming at times. Most companies agree that getting a new employee "up to speed" is the first and most important goal.
But that process is different in every organization. Do you allow shadowing? Do you conduct training? Are there guidelines for working with clients?
Instead of just focusing on training, I now plan to get laser-focused on my new hire's first work opportunity or goal. For example, should they be preparing to run a client call? Will they be presenting research? Are they expected to contribute to strategic planning internally?
Identifying a "big win" for your new hire builds their skills, helps identify regular work products they are expected to contribute to, and shows progress in their role.
If I could do things over, I'd be very specific about the first milestone for a new employee and the steps necessary to meet it. That way, they can get an early win.
Be a historian of your company
One of the biggest issues I felt managing a new hire was explaining our organization and culture. New employees should know about their department and their company: who the leaders are, how the business works, and what our work looks like across different clients and accounts.
Many managers can play an important role as "historians" of their company. They should know how their department runs inside and out. You should be able to give any new employee the lay of the land.
If hiring a new employee is about finding the best person and the right fit for your organization, then managing a new employee should focus on educating them about where they work. This simple task can help the new employee feel more at home in this new environment.
Take on a leadership role in the process
The famous business and management consultant Peter Drucker once said, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."
Drucker hits on the challenge between good management and great leadership. This issue is crucial for managing new employees. It's important to follow the processes in place. But where do you see them excelling? Are they stronger in one area or weaker in another?
Managing a new employee is more about doing the right things for them to succeed compared to just doing right and following a process. If I could go back, I'd remember that managing a new employee may not be as straight of a line as the onboarding process tells us.
Russia sortied its ships from the port of Tartus after the fall of the Assad regime it had backed. Here, a Russian naval officer saluted aboard a missile corvette in Tartus, Syria in 2019.
MAXIME POPOV/AFP via Getty Images
Russia faces the prospect of losing key bases in Syria but still has moves left.
Keeping its bases may come down to lucrative deals with the now victorious groups it had attacked.
These bases are critical to Russian influence in the Middle East and would not be easily replaced.
Syria has been central to Russian plans to project power across the Middle East — as evidenced by the recent signing of a 49-year lease for Syrian bases.
But after the ouster of the ally it propped up, Syrian President Bashar Assad, Russian officials face the likelihood its days in Syria are numbered.
"Russia's certainly doing everything in its power to maintain a presence in Syria while preparing for the possibility that this is the end," Ben Dubow, a nonresident senior fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told Business Insider.
Moscow is doing so by "not only leaving their ships out at sea but, according to [Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham's] official Telegram channel, disbursing weapons to local Alawite groups," Dubow said. "Reaching out to the new leadership is both an act of desperation and an acceptance of the new reality."
This is a look at the dimming options Russia now faces.
Reduced footprint
Shortly after Assad fled to Russia, a deal was reportedly reached with the interim authorities, led by the victorious Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham Islamist movement, guaranteeing the security of these bases, and the armed opposition presently has no plans to attack them. Still, it's far from clear that the future leadership in Damascus is willing to tolerate a long-term Russian military presence.
For now, some Russian warships are anchored outside the Tartus base as a precaution, and there are other Russian military movements in Syria.
"There is quite a lot of military equipment that has been hastily withdrawn to the coastal region or is being withdrawn at the moment from various remote regions," Anton Mardasov, a nonresident scholar with the Middle East Institute's Syria program, told BI. "So, the ships that are going to Syria from the Baltic Fleet and the military transport planes that are coming to Hmeimim may be taking out this excess equipment."
Alongside its Tartus naval base, Russia also has a sizable airbase in Latakia named Hmeimim, which it has used as a launchpad to conduct airstrikes throughout Syria since intervening in the country's bloody civil war in 2015.
"It may not be a question of a complete evacuation of the bases right now," Mardasov said. "Rather, a new government, possibly appointed after March 2025, should issue a decree denouncing or legitimizing Damascus' past treaty with Moscow."
A bare minimum force in Syria would "deprive" Russia of its capacity to counter NATO on its southern flank, Mardasov said.
Renewed access
A Russian SU-24M jet fighter takes off from an airbase in Hmeimim, Syria in 2015.
Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Russia signed an extendable 49-year lease agreement with Assad's regime in 2017 for these bases, seemingly entrenching its forces in the Middle Eastern country for generations to come. The treaty even granted the Russian military legal immunity for its personnel in the country, meaning they would not be held accountable for killing Syrians.
"I can't speak to whether the 2017 agreements are binding, but at this point, only Russia could enforce them, and there's no sign they have the will or capacity to do so," Dubow said. "If Damascus orders Russia to leave, Moscow would be hard-pressed to withstand a siege."
Russia's best hope may be to try to extend its access until new deals can be made with the new Syrian leaders. The offers will likely have to be very lucrative to win over a Syrian opposition inured to Russian airstrikes and ruthless mercenaries.
Russia would likely offer money and other economic incentives, such as discounted refined fuel products, in return for Syria's new rulers tolerating its military presence.
But these would likely be short-term arrangements.
"In the long run, it is unlikely Russia's use of the facilities can be preserved considering considerable antipathy to Russia among Syria's new authorities after Russia's years of support to the Assad regime," said Matthew Orr, a Eurasia analyst at the risk intelligence company RANE.
Syria's interim authorities could even benefit from a continued Russian presence in the short term, he said. That could counterbalance the US presence on the other side of the country and serve as a bargaining chip in negotiations with other powers.
Complete withdrawal
Russia's choices are stark if it can't reach a deal. It can try to guard bases in an uneasy stand-off with HTS-led forces, which comes with risks of its troops being harmed or captured and subjected to trials that would humiliate Russia. Or it can airlift out its forces and materiel.
Orr, the RANE analyst, doesn't anticipate a hasty Russian withdrawal from Syria. Instead, Russia is probably preparing "for an orderly withdrawal from the facilities, likely after failed attempts to negotiate their preservation in the coming months," Orr told BI.
"Their loss would harm Russia's power projection because they are crucial logistical points for Russian military operations in Africa, the Middle East, and Russia's global naval operations, and Russia does not have immediately available alternatives to the facilities."
Tartus remains Moscow's only naval facility in the Mediterranean, making it vital for any extended Russian Navy deployment south of the Black Sea and Turkish Straits. Along with Hmeimim, it serves as a hub for supporting Russian military and mercenary deployments in Africa.
Moscow has had access to Tartus since the Soviet era in the 1970s. Furthermore, Russia invested in its expansion in the 2010s, making its potential loss all the more painful.
One alternative Russian port outside of Syria could be Tobruk in eastern Libya, which is controlled by the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar. CEPA's Dubow is skeptical that the Libyan port near Egypt could be any substitute.
"Tobruk would not come close to making up for Tartus and Latakia," Dubow said. "It's both smaller and much further from Russia. Even a significant reduction of Russian presence in Syria would immensely damage Russia's power projection capacity."
In this case, could Russia's loss be Turkey's gain? Turkey is close to the HTS-led coalition, but it too may lack the cachet to win permanent bases.
"The Turkish Navy doesn't need the Tartus base, and the possibility will depend on security conditions on the ground, which are still unclear many months from now, so it doesn't seem likely in the near term," RANE's Orr said.
"But in general, the Tartus port is something that if there is a unified government in Syria, they will definitely try to leverage for security and economic ties with a great power, or remove the base as part of geopolitical balancing between powers."
Paul Iddon is a freelance journalist and columnist who writes about Middle East developments, military affairs, politics, and history. His articles have appeared in a variety of publications focused on the region.
The 1988 buddy-comedy action flick "Midnight Run" had an unexpected impact on the restaurant industry. While the romp about a bounty hunter transporting an accountant across the country didn't make a box-office splash, one line stuck around.
"A restaurant is a very tricky investment," the accountant, played by Charles Grodin, tells the bounty hunter, played by Robert DeNiro. DeNiro's character dreams of opening a coffee shop with his big score, but the accountant shuts him down: "More than half of them go under within the six months."
The idea that restaurants are a bad investment predates the film, but the quote lodged in people's minds. Over the past 20 years as a cook, restaurant critic, and food writer, I've heard Grodin's risk assessment quoted repeatedly, almost verbatim. But if restaurants really are a lousy investment, then why would private-equity firms be dumping billions into the sector? Data from PitchBook found that private-equity investments into fast-casual restaurants grew from $7.7 million in 2013 to $231 million in 2023 — a nearly 3,000% increase.
In 2024 alone, Blackstone purchased 1,400 Tropical Smoothie Cafes and a majority stake in Jersey Mike's — deals that gave the chains multi-billion-dollar valuations. Sycamore Partners also bought 250 Playa Bowls locations. Before its IPO in 2023, the Mediterranean eatery Cava raised nearly $750 million from private investors. Meanwhile, SoftBank Vision Fund has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into restaurant tech over the past decade.
All that cash has led to a boom in places like Chipotle, Shake Shake, and Sweetgreen. Between 2009 and 2018, the number of fast-casual restaurants in America doubled, while sales have nearly tripled. Meanwhile, the amount of money Americans spend eating out has jumped by nearly 60% since 2009. That doesn't exactly sound like a lousy investment.
The trouble is that private equity has a knack for destroying businesses. Red Lobster declared bankruptcy earlier this year after 10 years under private-equity management, Toys "R" Us famously shut down following a private-equity takeover, and even hospitals have struggled after private equity got involved. The cash infusion to wannabe chains and franchises has also made it harder for independently funded restaurants to compete for customers, real estate, and staff. When the gravy train stops, fast-casual restaurants are going to be in trouble.
To understand why private equity is pouring money into restaurants, we have to start with the appeal of the fast-casual model. In some ways, it's the golden mean of restaurants. You can charge twice as much for a meal at a fast-casual spot as you can at a fast-food joint. In Manhattan, a Burger King cheeseburger costs $3.40, whereas a Shake Shack burger will run you $7.79. But when you look at the overhead costs, there isn't much difference. Both restaurants staff a similar number of people and rely on similar ingredients. Chipotle may offer a burrito, a bowl, a quesadilla, and a salad, but it's all more or less the same ingredients: beans, corn, salsa, cheese, and basic proteins. The limited menu enables both fast-food and fast-casual restaurants to be efficient, keep costs down, and avoid losses from food waste and labor. And since fast-casual spots appear to be the nicer restaurants — with gourmet ingredients like brioche buns, healthy-sounding options, and claims of sustainable sourcing — they can charge more. If price and speed aren't priorities, many people would prefer to grab lunch at a Chipotle than at a Taco Bell.
The model also has an edge over sit-down restaurants, which have struggled in recent years. "Casual dining proper is not doing so well," Alex M. Susskind, a professor of food and beverage management at Cornell University, says. "Fast casual has provided consumers with a better meal experience that's equal to, or in some instances better than, a casual-dining restaurant, with less of a time and financial commitment."
The food is just as good, but the service is much faster. He says that's helped make the model a better investment than a place like Applebee's. Thanks in part to those higher profit margins, one restaurant analyst said it takes 18 months for a Chipotle to pay back buildout costs, compared to five years for a Cheesecake Factory.
That's what's making the investments in these businesses attractive. Because a lot of the weaker players have been weeded out.
"PE is investing money in the fast-casual market because the economics of a fast-casual concept is much better than any other type of restaurant concept," says Chris Macksey, the CEO of Prix Fixe Accounting, which specializes in hospitality. "Profit margins are anywhere from 10% to 15% as opposed to a full-service restaurant, which is 5% to 8%. Fast casual is just a far more scalable concept."
Scalability is really the brass ring. Investors in fast-casuals aren't buying restaurants; they're buying the potential growth of restaurant brands. Susskind says the boom reminds him of the late 1990s when casual-dining brands like Applebee's, TGI Fridays, and Olive Garden were taking off. He sees the recent shutdown of some of those chains — such as TGI Fridays, Red Lobster, and Smokey Bones — as a market correction for their overexpansion.
"That's what's making the investments in these businesses attractive. Because a lot of the weaker players have been weeded out," Susskind says about fast-casual restaurants. The frenzy has also been encouraged by the successful IPOs of companies like Sweetgreen in 2021 and Cava in 2023. Seeing Cava's stock grow by nearly 250% since its IPO has left investors searching for similar success.
While Sweetgreens and Dave's Hot Chickens are popping up across the country, independent restaurateurs are often left scrambling — not even for a piece of the pie, but for the crumbs.
Tracy Goh is the chef and owner of Damaran Sara, a two-year-old Malaysian restaurant in San Francisco, home of some of the most expensive commercial real estate in America. She's experienced landlords' preferences for fast-casual chains over small businesses like hers. "Especially for me, because it's my first restaurant. I don't have data to convince them that I can stay on a lease as long as they are likely to," Goh says. "They have a preference for the franchises or the big names."
A landlord's job is to generate money from their property. Their business isn't about enriching their community; it's about finding the most reliable tenants who can pay the most rent. In the restaurant real-estate space, that often means fast-food and fast-casual brands backed by major investment firms.
When small-time restaurants get left out of the real-estate market, diners are left with a food scene that increasingly looks and tastes the same.
"If you're Chipotle or Shake Shack, you may decide to take a lease above market. You can afford it because you're privately funded," says Talia Berman, a partner at the hospitality advisory firm Friend of Chef and an expert in New York's restaurant real-estate market. "You beat out the competition because you don't care how much money you make in that space because it wasn't meant to be profitable based on the unit economics. It's part of a larger strategy."
That strategy is all about growth, she says. The primary goal of investment-backed restaurants is to expand quickly. "They're typically barreling toward an exit. So they're looking to get purchased by Nabisco or Darden or Levy or one of these huge restaurant conglomerates. And they need to show distribution — that they're operating in many states and that they have high top line," Berman says, referring to high sales volume.
A location that can gross $2 or $3 million in a year can demonstrate to a potential buyer that the eatery is successful — even if a high rent lowers the average unit profit margin. "They're thinking short term. It's a private equity mentality," says Berman.
Investment-backed restaurants also have a timing advantage over smaller shops. When a developer begins work on a new building that might lease space to a restaurant — a strip mall, food hall, or multipurpose apartment complex for instance — it's usually working on a multiyear timeline. Moshe Batalion, the vice president of national leasing for RioCan, one of Canada's largest real-estate-investment trusts, told me the firm starts thinking about who to lease to before it even breaks ground on a new property. Leases might be signed years before the space is even ready for move-in. Independent restaurateurs typically can't plan for a restaurant that won't open for two to three years.
"For independent operators, the real disadvantage is access of capital," Susskind says. "If they have access to a decent level of capital, they can grow, open more units." For chains, that's easy to do. But, he adds, "if I'm an independent, I don't know where I'm going to get $500,000 to ink a deal and build a restaurant."
When small-time restaurants get left out of the real-estate market, diners are left with a food scene that increasingly looks and tastes the same.
Thomas Crosby, the CEO of Pal's Sudden Service, a Tennessee-based chain of 31 burger shops, is all too familiar with the downsides of private equity. It's why he has eschewed outside investment. Millions of private-equity dollars might help triple the number of Pal's locations in five years — but could the chain continue to train and retest staff to remember that the perfect french fry is 3.7 inches long?
"As soon as you start taking investments or go public, you confuse your mission," Crosby says. "It becomes, what metrics can I do to wow stockholders instead of wow customers? And I think that's how so many companies get sideways. It's kind of like cars: You drive down the interstate, and you cannot hardly tell one brand from another. It becomes so homogenous." He adds: "That's what happens in the restaurant industry."
Chasing the success of another restaurant chain means everyone just tries to copy everyone else. "To please the stockholders or investors, they've got to be all things to all people," he says. By maintaining control over his operations, Crosby says, "We don't owe people money. We don't lease land. We have zero debt."
Since the early 2000s, private-equity firms started taking on a bigger role in the companies they'd invested in; these firms didn't just expect returns down the line, they began telling companies how to achieve those goals. This was good for innovation and safety, but bad for job creation and wages, with "sizable reductions in earnings per worker in the first two years post buyout," professors from Harvard and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business wrote in a 2014 research paper.
As soon as you start taking investments or go public, you confuse your mission.
In the long run, private equity often leaves companies worse off. In 2019, researchers found that public companies that are bought out by private-equity firms are 10 times as likely to go bankrupt as those that aren't — a finding that complicates the argument that companies like Toys "R" Us closed simply because of market forces. Similar to the casual-dining boom before it, Susskind, the Cornell professor, believes that the investment boom in the fast-casual sector will eventually lead to a bust.
Already, the graveyard of private-equity-backed restaurants is growing. BurgerFi, which has 93 locations and 51 pizza subsidiaries, primarily in Florida, received $80 million in investments just a few years ago. But despite last year's plan to update the chain's stores, menus, and technology, the investment has largely transformed into debt. The company defaulted on $51 million in credit obligations this year, and in September, it filed for bankruptcy.
Between 2015 and 2019, Mod Pizza received a total of $334 million in private-equity investments, which enabled the brand to grow to 512 locations across Western states, with over 12,000 employees. In 2019, the firm boasted of being "the fastest-growing restaurant chain in the United States for the past four years," with a plan to hit 1,000 locations in five years. The rapid expansion outpaced realistic sales growth, and earlier this year, the company closed over 40 locations.
Similarly, Rubio's Fresh Mexican Grill, founded in 1983 in California, was acquired by Mill Road Capital in 2010 for $91 million. The new ownership updated the name (to Rubio's Coastal Grill), the interior design, and the menu. Renovations at each location cost about $200,000. The chain ended up declaring bankruptcy twice: once in 2020 and again earlier this year. Though the company attributed the first filing to pandemic lockdowns, it was already struggling to maintain its growth and stay in the green prior to 2020. When it closed more restaurants earlier this year,some employees found they were unable to cash their final paychecks.
Even some of the most visible success stories of investment-based growth haven't borne fruit. Sweetgreen, "the Starbucks of salad" that was heavily backed by venture capital before its IPO, grew from one location in 2007 to 227 this year, with plans to open another 30 a year — though the company still hasn't seen a profitable year. The chain lost over $26 million last year.
At some point, the market taps out and there isn't room for more growth. Americans are already spending 42% more money on dining out than they are on groceries.
Berman says that the high volatility creates opportunities. For one, when a cash-rich restaurant bails on a retail location, it becomes available as a turnkey space, complete with HVAC, grease traps, and floor drains. Berman's company recently made a deal for a popular food brand to build out a research kitchen. It's designed to be an experiment, but they signed a 10-year lease. "Believe me, this place is not going to be around in three years, I promise you," she says. That leaves the door open for other entrepreneurs to take over.
In other words, don't get too attached to the Sweetgreen down the street. It may take longer than six months for private-equity-backed restaurants to go under, but there's a good chance your new fave won't be around in a few years.
Corey Mintz is a food reporter focusing on the intersection between food, economics, and labor. He is also the author of "The Next Supper: The End Of Restaurants As We Knew Them, And What Comes After."
Pennsylvania State Police via AP, Alex Kent/Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
It used to be that when a killer emerged in America, we found out who the man was before we began to enshroud him in myth. But with Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, that process was reversed. The internet assumed it already knew everything about Thompson's killer before a suspect had even been identified, let alone arrested.
Within hours of the shooting, social media was churning out a mythologized version of the masked man. In his anonymity, he became an instant folk hero, portrayed as a crusader for universal healthcare, a martyr willing to risk it all to send a message to America's insurance giants with "the first shots fired in a class war." A Reddit forum offered up dozens of laudatory nicknames to crystalize his mythology: the Readjuster, the Denier, the People's Debt Collector, Modern-Day Robin Hood. "I actually feel safer with him at large," one tweet a day after the shooting said; it received 172,000 likes. A surveillance image of the suspect moved some to comment that he was "too hot to convict" and prompted comparisons to Jake Gyllenhaal and Timothée Chalamet. In New York City, a "CEO-shooter look-alike competition" was held in Washington Square Park. Surely, the internet assumed, the suspect shared left-wing ideas about the cruelties of privatized healthcare.
Then the man himself appeared — and he didn't fit into any of the neat categories that had already been created to describe him. On X, he followed the liberal columnist Ezra Klein and the conservative podcaster Joe Rogan. He respected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and retweeted a video of Peter Thiel maligning "woke"-ism. He took issue with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He played the cartoon video game "Among Us," posted shirtless thirst traps, quoted Charli XCX on Instagram, and had the Goodreads account of an angsty, heterodox-curious teenage boy: self-help, bro-y nonfiction, Ayn Rand, "The Lorax," and "Infinite Jest." Yes, he seemed to admire the Unabomber. But mostly, this guy — a former prep-school valedictorian with an Ivy League education and a spate of tech jobs — was exceedingly centrist and boring. A normie's normie. He wasn't an obvious lefty, but he wasn't steeped in the right-wing manosphere either. His posted beliefs don't fit neatly into any preestablished bucket. In his 261-word manifesto, which surfaced online, he downplayed his own qualifications to critique the system. "I do not pretend," he wrote, "to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument."
In the attention economy, patience is a vice.
That didn't stop the denizens of social media from pretending to be the most qualified people to lay out exactly who Mangione is. He's "fundamentally anti-capitalist" and "just another leftist nut job." Or he's "a vaguely right-wing ivy league tech bro." Or he was invented by the CIA, or maybe Mossad, as a "psyop." The reality of Mangione — his messy, sometimes contradictory impulses — allowed everyone to cherry-pick the aspects of his personality that confirmed their original suspicions. In the attention economy, patience is a vice.
The rush to romanticize killers is nothing new. A quarter century ago, we cast the Columbine shooters as undone by unfettered access either to guns or to the satanic influences of Marilyn Manson and Rammstein. A decade ago, we debated the glamorization of the Boston Marathon bomber, gussied up like a rock star on the cover of Rolling Stone. But social media has sped up the assumption cycle to the point where we put the killer into a category before police have found the killer. Perhaps there's a "great rewiring" of our brains that has diminished our capacity to understand each other, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests in "The Anxious Generation" — a book Mangione had retweeted a glowing review of.
Mythmaking is easier, of course, when it's unencumbered by reality. The less we know about a killer, the more room there is to turn him into something he's not. From what we have learned so far, Mangione is a troubled Gen Zer who won the privilege lottery at birth and ascribed to a mishmash of interests and beliefs. We will surely learn more about him in the coming days, weeks, and months. But now that we know who he is, it will be hard, if not impossible, to let go of our initial assumptions. Instead, we'll selectively focus on the details that fit tidily into the myths we've already created. In the digital-age version of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," the legend was already printed by the time the facts came along.
Scott Nover is a freelance writer in Washington, DC. He is a contributing writer at Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek covering media and technology.
When Russ Schmidt was about 12, he was helping out on his family's farm in rural Kansas when his father looked at him and said, "You're not worth anything if you're not working."
Those words fixed themselves in Schmidt's brain. Decades later — at age 66 — they still have a hold on him.
"I was, I am, a really good employee," he says. Through his two careers in San Francisco, first as an administrator and then as a nurse for 20-odd years, he often did more than what his job required. "I see something that needs to be done, I do it," he says. He rarely took time off, so before he could officially retire in February 2023, he had to use the four months of vacation time he had accrued.
The change of pace of retirement was rough. His life became a cycle of alternating between bed and couch, eating and watching Netflix. He told himself he needed rest and recuperation — "but at some point," he says, "I realized this is settling into depression." After six months, Schmidt found a job working at a sexual-health clinic for two days a week.
When we think of retirement, we often think of endless leisure and zero responsibility. You might imagine yourself relaxing poolside with a book, strolling through a golf course, or binge-watching TV shows. In fact, many retirees live like this. The 2023 American Time Use Survey found that adults between 65 and 74 spent, on average, almost seven hours a day on leisure and sports, with four of those hours spent watching TV. Adults 25 to 54, on the other hand, averaged about four hours of leisure time and about two hours watching TV.
Spending your twilight years lying around might sound ideal — after all, everyone deserves a chance to relax after decades of working. But research suggests a life of pure leisure doesn't make you happier or healthier. About a third of American adults have said they struggled in transitioning to a life without work, and sedentary lifestyles are associated with earlier death. People are living about 15 years longer than they did a hundred years ago, which means we have many more years to spend in retirement. While there's much hand-wringing over how to save up enough money to enjoy those work-free years, much less discussed is how we should spend those years. More and more research is finding that both physical and social activity are crucial for well-being in old age — they keep people happier and living longer.
But that's not what most people are doing. Americans are doing retirement all wrong.
The concept of retirement as we know it came from German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who in 1889 designed a social insurance program compelling the government to care for people who couldn't work because of age or disability. When Social Security was established in the US in 1935, the retirement age was set at 65, though the average life expectancy was about 60 years. The norm was for people to work until they could not work anymore. Today the average life expectancy is about 77, and the age you can start receiving full Social Security benefits is either 66 or 67, depending on when you were born. We're working longer and living longer.
That has created two problems: People need to figure out how to pay for a longer retirement and how to spend their time. Anqi Chen, a senior research economist at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, says people are addressing both by simply working longer. Researchers, she says, have seen more people claim Social Security while they're still earning an income — something that used to be typical only of retirees. Of Americans 65 and older, nearly 11 million, or about 19%, are employed, and that number is projected to rise to nearly 15 million by 2032. Twenty years ago, just under 5 million Americans over 65 were employed.
"People think that this transition is a piece of cake, and it's not," Cascio says. "It can feel like jumping off a cliff."
Schmidt straddles these scenarios. Before retirement, he changed jobs too often to properly build up a pension — something he didn't realize until it was too late. Now finances are tight. "In that sense, retirement has been a letdown and a struggle," he says. He and his husband, who hasn't yet retired, have watched their savings dip even as Schmidt contributes through his part-time work.
Dee Cascio, a counselor and retirement coach in Sterling, Virginia, says the growing urge to work in retirement points to a larger issue: Work fulfills a lot of needs that people don't know how to get elsewhere, including relationships, learning, identity, direction, stability, and a sense of order. The structure that work provides is hard to move away from, says Cascio, who is 78 and still practicing. "People think that this transition is a piece of cake, and it's not," she says. "It can feel like jumping off a cliff."
In an online survey conducted early this year by Mass Mutual, a majority of retirees said they'd become less stressed and more relaxed upon retirement, but as many as a third reported that they'd become unhappier. Research from the Health and Retirement Study from the University of Michigan suggests that some of the negative effects people can experience in retirement are tied to lifestyle changes such as being less active and social in the absence of work.
For some, the solution is to never give up work. Schmidt feels that even if there had been no need for him to make money after retiring, he still would've sought out a part-time job. With it, "I don't feel useless," he says. "I do work that feels like I'm really giving something to the community."
But returning to your old line of work is hardly the only way to stay emotionally and intellectually fulfilled in retirement.
The idea that our personal worth is determined by how hard we work and how much money we make is deeply embedded in US work culture. This "Protestant work ethic" puts the responsibility of attaining a good quality of life and well-being on the worker — if you don't have the time or resources for leisure, it's because you haven't earnedit. Or as Schmidt's father put it, "You're not worth anything if you're not working." This pernicious way of thinking prevents people from seeing purpose or value in life that doesn't involve working for a paycheck.
So what does purpose outside a career look like? Paul Draper thinks he's figured it out.
There are a million fun things to do, but 99% of them are unsustainable to do as a career.
In August 2023, six months before he was set to retire from his job as an enterprise-software product manager, Draper, now 68, made a plan. He liked his job and felt satisfied leaving it behind, but he recognized he still had a lot of energy and wanted to learn new things and meet new people. He was already involved in volunteering — doing prison ministry and working with soup kitchens — but more than that, "I was interested in doing things that I didn't know anything about," he says.
Draper's first thought was to work at a hardware store. He was somewhat handy but wanted to learn more about home repair. So he did. He got a part-time job at his local big-box hardware store handling doors, windows, and staircases. "That was great," he says, "because all of a sudden I had to learn a lot" to be able to answer customers' questions and solve their problems.
The job was never meant to be a forever thing. After 10 months, it began to feel more monotonous and less like a learning opportunity, so Draper decided to move on. He plans to replicate that experience and pursue other areas of work he's fascinated by. "There's a company in my area that builds continuous transmissions for bicycles and e-bikes," he says. "I just want to intern there." His dream role, however, is to lead city tours on Segways.
Since Draper isn't worried about needing an income, he can focus on learning. "There are a million fun things to do, but 99% of them are unsustainable to do as a career," he says. He views retirement as his opportunity to experiment with that 99% without worrying about achievement, a career, and the general hustle. Plus, he says it's been fairly easy to find these gigs. "I have found that there's a lot of employers that love retirees," he says. "One, because they're good with people. Two, because they're very reliable for the time that they have them, and they're calm, and they work well with other employees."
Cascio has found that when helping clients bring purpose back into their lives in retirement, it can help to think about the "six arenas of life": work, relationships, leisure, personal growth, finances, and health. A lot of people have drawn their sense of purpose or identity from work, and they might want to continue doing so through jobs or volunteering in retirement, she says. But any of these arenas can be a source of purpose. "If you haven't attended to your health and that's something you want to improve in retirement, that can become a purpose," she says.
Some activities can provide purpose in several of those areas. Draper's various odd jobs mean that he's more physically active than he would be if he stayed at home, and he's constantly meeting new people. "I've heard of people's circles closing up, but I'm finding I interact with more people, and on a regular basis," he says. Both greater social interaction and increased physical activity are associated with happier and healthier aging.
Sometimes older adults have to first overcome the idea that because they are older they are limited.
Kim says retirees who aren't exercising, socializing, or pursuing a sense of purpose may have self-limiting beliefs and pessimistic views of aging. "I've met people who will say, 'I'm X years old, and people who are this age don't really exercise anymore,'" regardless of whether their bodies are capable, he says. Sometimes older adults have to first overcome the idea that because they are older they are limited. A well-known 2002 study — and much follow-up research — found that people with more positive views of aging lived longer than those with more negative views. Kim says it can be tough to surmount those limiting beliefs, especially in a society where aging is seen as something to be avoided. In reality, there's no expiration date for finding new sources of fulfillment.
Of course, some people are perfectly happy with a leisure-filled retirement. "If you're only golfing and watching TV and you don't feel like there's anything missing in your life, you're completely happy, then I wouldn't go and say there is a psychological reason why you need to go and volunteer for a cause you care about," says Yochai Shavit, the director of research at the Stanford Center on Longevity. If you live a life of leisure but are still bored, or if you're ignoring a sense of discontentment, that's when the trouble starts. "The risk I see is that people brush aside those feelings," he says.
There's no "one size fits all" formula to retirement, but experts like Shavit hope that more people approach retirement with the understanding that they still have the ability — and often the time — to find meaning and fulfillment. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that "boredom is a 'natural' part of retirement and having aches, both internally and physically, is just a part of growing old," Shavit says. They're not, and they don't have to be.
Hannah Seo is a Korean-Canadian journalist based in Brooklyn, New York, who writes about health, climate, and social science.
YYou've just been added to a meeting. It's late afternoon, late in the week, and someone is presenting a deck. Geez, here we go. The presenter reads words that you can also read from a bulleted list on a lightly decorated page projected before you. Next slide. Because you've seen hundreds of PowerPoint presentations since your sixth-grade science-fair days, you instinctively know this one's going to take the full hour. Eyes glaze over, yawns are stifled. Next slide. The presenter attempts to play an embedded video, but the audio doesn't work. "You get the idea" though. Next slide.
Nearly four decades after the launch of PowerPoint, the slide deck remains one of the most dominant forces shaping how we think — and don't think — about our work. From startup pitches to Pentagon procurement timetables, from quarterly board meetings to annual harassment trainings, billions of presentations are given each year in a single rigid, information-squishing format, on PowerPoint or its imitators Keynote, Google Slides, or now Figma Slides. Humanity continues to cram compelling and vital information into single-idea slides, strip these ideas of context, and read them aloud among a flurry of GIFs, charts, and animated wipes and swipes. Rarely does the deck — which by design dictates a one-sided style of conversation — elicit robust questions from or conversation with the audience. We are constantly pitching our bosses, their bosses, investors, and each other via a one-size rhetorical tool that doesn't really fit all.
But some are finally thinking outside the deck. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and military top brass have been bad-mouthing and even banning slide presentations from meetings, instead favoring memos or even old-fashioned, visual-aid-free, raw-dogged discussion. Rippling, which makes HR and payroll software, has done the impossible: complete a funding round (a $45 million Series A) without a deck. Several startups, including one from Edward Norton — yes, the actor — have launched alternatives to the deck. It appears that even three Academy Award nominations cannot spare one's life from the stultifying ubiquity of decks, and Norton and his two cofounders at Zeck are on a mission to vanquish it.
Is the deck in jeopardy? Are we at last approaching a day when "this meeting could have been an email" lives alongside "this meeting could have gone without a deck"? Next slide.
For most of the 20th century, workplace meetings were typically small and informal discussions with a few colleagues. By the 1980s, the computer revolution was generating loads more information for every business to digest and act on. This meant more and bigger meetings across departments, which meant more presentations, which usually meant slide projectors. But those presentations were clunky, finicky, and laborious to make.
Then, in the mid-'80s, an ailing software startup called Forethought developed a first-of-its-kind graphics program in which computer users could string together a series of slides. Originally called Presenter, it was released in April 1987, as PowerPoint. Microsoft immediately saw its world-changing potential, buying Forethought just four months later for $14 million. For one thousandth of the nearly $14 billion the company has invested in OpenAI, Microsoft acquired a program that remains arguably more consequential to how businesses operate. By 1993, Microsoft was raking in $100 million from PowerPoint sales a year; by 2003, $1 billion. Microsoft estimated that 30 million PowerPoint presentations were being made every day.
Decks have no shortage of zealots, including my former boss. When I worked at BarkBox, Nick Cogan, a vice president of creative, always had us making decks — not just for big retail pitches but for every little task. Product planning, style guide, whatever it was, we'd make a deck. I maybe want him to apologize for all the deck wrangling, but he laughs and doesn't give an inch defending them, which, as a former animator, he loves for their storytelling capabilities. "'Look at this, not us' can be essential when presenting," he says. He describes the perfect presentation as both a "useful crutch" and a "little kids' storybook," where he can walk the great and mighty decision-makers through storytime instead of business time.
I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking.
Steve Jobs
Christina Farr, a healthtech director and investor who wrote a book about storytelling in business, agrees, arguing that the deck actually draws its power from its ubiquity. Because people are used to both writing and receiving decks, "people know what the story should sound like," and the expected rhythms and beats of a PowerPoint presentation "are already baked in." But it's not just an emotional expectation, she says — it's also a formal one: "If you're raising money, in 2024, you have to have a deck. Everybody expects you to do it."
True, but there's also been no shortage of deck denigrators. In 2003, the media theorist Edward Tufte published "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," which remains one of the most deliciously damning indictments of a software program ever written. Over several thousand words, Tufte flambés PowerPoint, and "slideware" in general, for "making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues' time." Though PowerPoint was developed and even celebrated as a "cure for the presentation jitters," Tufte maligns it as overly oriented toward the presenter, leaving little room for the listener to chime in or even actively listen. Tufte even goes so far as to blame PowerPoint's "poverty of content" and its "foreshortening of evidence and thought" for the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
The jeremiad had many admirers, including Jeff Bezos. Inspired by Tufte, the Amazon CEO in June 2004 banned PowerPoint from executive meetings. The book "Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon" describes Bezos as finding slide decks "frustrating, inefficient, error-prone," with a stiff format that "made it difficult to evaluate actual progress." In its place the company developed what's become known as the Amazon Six-Pager: a detailed memo outlining — in narrative prose, not bullet points — the conversations and business problems that have surfaced the need for a meeting. In a deck, information takes a back seat to form and format; the memo, in contrast, forces the presenter to embody a Joan Didion axiom: "I don't know what I think until I write it down." Attendees read the six-pager before the meeting, so everyone can enter the meeting informed and be held accountable for the decisions made out of the discussion.
In 2011, Steve Ballmer maligned decks while he was CEO of PowerPoint maker Microsoft. Before meetings he told employees, "Please don't present the deck."
Steven Ferdman/Getty Images
"I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Steve Jobs once opined, adding that "people who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint." Even Steve Ballmer, who sits atop literal millions and owns the Los Angeles Clippers in part because of PowerPoint money, maligned decks while he was CEO of Microsoft. "I don't think it's efficient," he said in 2011, adding, "Most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: 'I've got the following four questions. Please don't present the deck.'" Over the years, many members of the US military have cast aspersions toward what they call "death by PowerPoint."
"The incentive structures for a slide deck are all bad," says Aviv Gilboa, the president of Skylight, a consumer tech company known for its digital picture frames and calendars. To Gilboa, who worked at Amazon for four years, decks aren't just boring, they're antithetical to many ways we think and work. The format of a single slide is inherently low-information: When you're pitching, you're persuading, and so you can fit only one idea per slide, often forcing you to leave some good ideas behind.
Gilboa says decks also help presenters feel good without forcing them to engage with their decisions. Decks help reinforce this perception of assurance, what Gilboa calls "the smoke and mirrors of how we got to this choice." As I sat at BarkBox making decks every which way for every little business problem, I felt like a purveyor of both smoke and mirrors, no matter what my boss said about storytelling.
Many of our workplace problems have evident solutions made possible by software — for example, Google Docs, a miracle program that replaced back-and-forth documents and version control with fluid, collaborative workflow. But like many in the PowerPoint mines, I'm not sure what alternative could possibly replace slides at scale.
Zeck was born in 2022 out of its cofounders' rage at decks, especially in board meetings. "At our prior companies, the shortest deck we ever sent was 134 pages," Zeck's cofounder Robert Wolfe tells me, adding that "there was nothing more stressful" about preparing for those meetings. He says that at CrowdRise, the company he ran with his brother Jeffrey and Edward Norton, they'd stop all other work for 100 hours before every board meeting in order to write and build the quarterly decks they hated enough to found Zeck. In a nod to Norton, Wolfe integrated a "Fight Club" reference into the origin story on Zeck's website: "The meeting I just sat through was like the scene in Fight Club where you punch yourself in the face over and over."
Three-time Academy Award-nominated actor Edward Norton cofounded Zeck in 2022 to disrupt the ubiquity of slide decks.
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
To Wolfe, the deck model "literally creates antagonism" — everyone becomes an editor with a red pen, the deck presenting endless entry points for criticism. In the military or an everyday office, grunts and junior designers hate working on PowerPoints, tweaking pixels and making rounds of edits that drive everyone crazy, because in PowerPoint you're often not working on the idea, but only on the presentation of the idea.
Zeck proposes that the solution to the deck is a collaborative website. A Zeck site feels a bit like a Notion site but with tweaks that work well for the boardroom — it gives everyone edit access, is encrypted, can be personalized, and offers links so that your chief financial officer or finance team can access full reports and charts and important information. It is a revelation to not have that information simplified in a slide in a meeting where everyone has to sit through everything. And in Zeck's pitch I find a great clarity equaled so far only by Tufte himself: When we remove the awful slide deck, once again "the meeting can be a meeting." So far, Zeck counts among its clients Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, furniture maker Floyd, and the rocket startup Phantom Space Corporation.
While Zeck is unlikely to supplant PowerPoint any time soon, Wolfe thinks people are finally rebelling against the idea "that you only have Office and all the tools that go with it, or a Google Drive and all the tools that go with it." He makes a brazen prediction: "I would be shocked if in 18 months or five years people are still using flat slides for meetings that should be collaborative."
We aren't yet letting go of decks in business, but we've let them hop the fence into our wider culture, both celebrating and undermining their repressive formality and ubiquity. The post-irony generations are throwing "PowerPoint parties," and some singles, sick of dating apps, are using PowerPoint to make their cases as mates. A 2021 episode of the Bravo reality show "Summer House" featured a subplot built around a romantic gesture delivered via PowerPoint. For some, slides may be a love language. There are even famous decks now, like this 300-pager in which a hedge-fund excoriated Olive Garden's business practices, or, my favorite, Jennifer Egan's PowerPoint chapter from her 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "A Visit from the Goon Squad."
Egan tells me she got a crash course in the program from her business-world sister, who "thinks in PowerPoint." The formal experiment of a PowerPoint chapter was exciting, though the "cold, corporate vibe" was perhaps incompatible with real, genuine emotion and the stuff contained in great novels. She suggests this tension gives the finished chapter — "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," the 12-year-old protagonist Alison Blake's account of her autistic brother's favorite pauses in classic rock songs interspersed with descriptions of their mom and dad coming and going, fighting and reflecting — its power. The chapter delivers earnest emotion without being schlocky, and is brave and hilarious without being corny. Egan says she isn't typically this type of writer, but the PowerPoint format gave her the ability to tell "this very sweet story in a cold holder."
Perhaps the PowerPoint parties and Egan have it right and we should let PowerPoint do what it does best: tell stories. For Egan, a deck arguably won a Pulitzer. For NASA, a deck arguably killed astronauts. In the big middle between those outcomes, we're still deciding whether a story is always what's necessary — and what to do about decks.
Matt Alston's writing has appeared in Wired, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Believer. He trained as a civil engineer, and now works as a copywriter in tech. He lives in Maine with his wife and daughter.
Once upon a time, corporate bosses, associates, and interns alike would set aside their different titles and gather each December for drinks, dancing, and conversation. There would be gourmet dinners, chocolate fountains, DJs, and even live bands. For some, it was a night of merriment and splendor; for others, of awkward small talk, followed by deep regret.
Then the holiday party became endangered. In the wake of #MeToo in 2017, more professionals began rethinking the wisdom of a boozed-up night with their colleagues. The pandemic and remote work delivered a near death blow. In a 2020 survey of about 200 HR representatives by the executive-outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a mere 23% said they opted for seasonal celebrations, nearly three-quarters of which would be held virtually.
But as the return to offices continues, companies are slowly reinstituting holiday parties. Last year, nearly 65% of companies surveyed by Challenger, Gray, & Christmas said they planned to host in-person holiday parties, within sight of the 80% reported in 2016, before the advent of #MeToo. If plans pan out, this year could have before-times levels of corporate holiday cheer.
The return of the office holiday party could be a happier development than many jaded workers are likely inclined to presume. With two-thirds of the American white-collar workforce working remotely either some or all of the time, according to a USA Today survey conducted earlier this year, face time with colleagues and superiors is no longer a default feature of the 9-to-5. That might not be a big deal for everyone, but early-career workers stand to pay the steepest professional price for missing out on the kinds of networking and mentorship opportunities that are likelier to happen organically in a shared physical space. All the while, workers across the board are feeling increasingly lonely, overextended, and disengaged. They need something — anything — to celebrate.
In a work environment punctuated by uncertainty and isolation, it might be premature to let one's inner Scrooge have the final word on the tradition.
From Fezziwig's ball in "A Christmas Carol" to the power-suited backdrop of the 1988 Christmas Eve action thriller "Die Hard," the workplace holiday party has been a fixture of the cultural imagination for generations. But in the mid-20th century, the event garnered its enduring reputation for sloppiness and day-after regret. A 1948 Life magazine photo spread from a Christmas party thrown in the office of a Manhattan insurance brokerage depicts, among other modern-day HR violations, a pantless male executive dancing arm in arm with a young female stenographer and a pair of colleagues leaning in for a smooch beneath a bundle of mistletoe.
Somewhere along the way, festivities evolved from low-key gatherings held at the office to lavish affairs that might include gourmet meals, hired entertainment, and even international travel and accommodation on the boss' dime. The pandemic notwithstanding, the economic pendulum has largely dictated its tilt toward excess or restraint.
I've never experienced a company holiday party like it since.
As a Toronto-area DJ during the halcyon days of the late-'90s dot-com bubble, Baruch Labunski had a front-row seat to corporate-party splendor. "I went to many and saw a lot of crazy things," he said. He described being flown to DJ holiday parties in far-flung global destinations such as Bora Bora, Palawan, and Ibiza — and, on top of that, getting paid $50,000 to $100,000 per event. (When I asked how many holiday parties he booked in a typical season, he said only "many.") By the time the dot-com bubble burst and the demand for his services cooled, Labunski had tired himself out of the DJ booth and pivoted to a career in marketing.
Economic recovery in the mid-2000s spurred a holiday-party renaissance, only to be dashed once again in the 2008 recession. A few years later, Wall Street firms were reportedly back to enjoying hush-hush holiday festivities reminiscent of their heydays. The free-money firehose of the ZIRP era was in full force, and excess was back in style.
Danielle Kane, who was a reporter for a niche New York City financial-services publication between 2015 and 2017, said that one year her company flew the entire staff of 50 to 75 people to Berlin. "Hotels and flights were paid for, there was an experiential dinner at the Berlin TV Tower, and then they paid for everyone to get into a fancy club afterwards," she said. "It was a late night, and I've never experienced a company holiday party like it since."
For all their fun, these often cringe-inducing affairs earned a bad rap — one that may come to bite younger workers.
Despite some companies' largesse, the general workforce's enthusiasm for holiday parties has long been mixed. In a 2017 survey of American workers by Randstad, 90% of respondents said they'd rather receive bonuses or extra vacation days than attend a company holiday party. "The ideal situation," Constance Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist, told me, "is to offer activities that foster employee social health (such as a holiday party) without asking them to sacrifice their financial health (such as a bonus) or their mental health (such as time off)."
Companies squander the opportunity to make holiday gatherings meaningful in all sorts of small but critical ways. Hadley said the Christmas-specific focus of many company holiday parties could be alienating to workers who follow non-Christian religious traditions. Parties are often held at inconvenient times and places — too late on a weeknight for parents, in a location that has expensive parking or is hard to access. Holiday parties at big firms can also be loud, hot, and crowded, which makes it difficult to have meaningful conversations or meet new people.
Simply put, face time matters.
Well-planned company holiday parties, on the other hand, can be a boon to employees' overall work experience and even strengthen company culture. A study of workers at several German companies in 2019 concluded that parties could encourage social bonding, especially when employees' feedback steered the planning. The study suggests, for example, that icebreaker activities that get people from different parts of the organization talking help build camaraderie, despite the eye rolls they may initially provoke. Over time, that can contribute to a happier and more cohesive work environment.
For early-career workers, the benefits can be more pronounced. Rick Hermanns, the president and CEO of HireQuest, a global staffing company, said social events could help make up for the "intangible aspects of career growth and camaraderie between colleagues" that younger workers may miss out on when they're partly or fully remote. In a 2023 Adobe poll of more than 1,000 Gen Z workers at midsize and large US companies, 83% of respondents said a workplace mentor was crucial for their career, but only 52% said they had one. While holiday parties aren't the be-all and end-all of workplace networking, they provide a critical opening to build and fortify connections.
"When I look back at my early career in banking in Los Angeles, I appreciated the time I had to walk into a senior executive's office or grab a beer after work with colleagues," Hermanns said. "Those are the intangibles you can't quantify yet ultimately impact your career growth." Simply put, face time matters.
It makes sense that Gen Z and millennial workers would be more enthusiastic about workplace holiday get-togethers than their Gen X and baby-boomer counterparts. "Company leaders need to help Gen Z — as well as millennials, whose workplace experience was hugely disrupted by COVID — to build strong interpersonal workplace relationships," Hubert Palan, the CEO of the product-management company Productboard, told Business Insider last year.
Given that much of the global workforce feels lonely on the job, it's not just the youngest workers who need a social boost. A new study Hadley coauthored evaluating workplace loneliness and remedies found that the loneliest people at work were those who were offered the fewest social opportunities by their employer. "In fact, the number of social offerings provided was one of our most predictive variables in terms of whether someone was socially connected at work or not," she told me. Hadley also found that while fully remote work did seem to increase the risk of loneliness, it was less significant of a variable than whether a person was introverted or worked for an organization that held regular social activities for staffers.
The German study suggests that a holiday party can serve as the ritual capstone for these more routine coworker events, making year-end hobnobbing just a little extra special. While the ideal party activities will depend on an organization's culture, a few basic considerations — such as hosting the event somewhere besides the boring old office — go a long way. Elements of fun help too, whether they take the form of a themed photo booth, a creative dining experience, or, yes, a DJ.
A dash of festive foresight can make the difference between the raunchy affairs of yesteryear and a few hours of meaningful, PG-rated bonding between coworkers. "A nice holiday event gives people a break in their wallets and signals that the leaders value personal connections and socializing," Hadley said.
For a company's youngest workers, the benefits may last a professional lifetime.
Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.
My husband and I bought a storage unit business because we couldn't afford my daughter's college.
The business is nothing like I expected, and the customers are real characters who are difficult.
Although it can be a hard business to run, it pays for itself and for our daughter's tuition.
The good news is that I have a new pizza oven. The bad news is that it's bigger than my kitchen and weighs a ton.
It belonged to a restaurant owner who closed up shop, moved his equipment into a space at my storage-unit business, and then relocated to Eastern Europe. Before he left, he canceled his credit card payment.
A friend advised me to auction the pizza oven off. But my business is in a rural area, and no one here wants my oversize oven. In fact, I contacted every restaurant within a 40-mile radius offering this behemoth for free. I even called the local senior center and some churches just in case they wanted to add pizza production to their service offerings. No takers.
This is just one of the problems I now face as the unlikely owner of a storage-unit business.
We bought the business to make money for college tuition
When our daughter, Lauren, was born, my husband and I started a savings account to finance her college education. It's a great idea on paper, but by the time she was in middle school, we realized our efforts had been mostly thwarted by life's unexpected financial emergencies. Our savings would barely cover one year of college and then would be gone.
At a family meeting, we decided that instead of taking on student loans, we'd rather go into debt buying a business that would generate cash flow.
We found a fixer-upper mini storage business for sale and used Lauren's college savings as seed money to make the down payment. We paid $325,000, and it was a huge risk.
Owning a storage unit business is nothing like I expected
Before we bought the business, I assumed people would store their stuff, pay their rental fees, and eventually move on. I visualized a cycle of mostly passive income with the occasional hiccup that comes with any entrepreneurial project. I doubted that I'd get to know my customers because we wouldn't have much interaction.
Reality has been different. My phone number is posted on the side of a building. When people call about renting a unit, I'm the one who answers. I've learned that moving in or out of a storage facility often coincides with a life-changing event. People tell me their stories. They start new businesses and need space to store supplies. Spouses die, and survivors want to hold on to precious keepsakes. Moms get fed up with overflowing closets and want an orderly household. Renters get evicted and need to store furniture until they figure out a housing solution.
One man called in a panic. His U-Haul was full, and he wanted to unload it immediately. An hour later, after he dumped his mess and locked the door, he told me he was a landlord and that his tenant hadn't paid rent in a year. Courts had just given him possession of his property, but he was still required to store his tenant's possessions for a certain period of time. A month later, when his bill was due, he told me he wouldn't pay.
"Contact my tenant," he said. The tenant told me she didn't want the stuff either. Since my husband was out of town, Lauren and I shoveled out the unit — half-eaten pop tarts, soiled diapers, and wet laundry, along with every conceivable household item. We donated what was salvageable and took the rest to the landfill.
I also talk with customers when they can't pay their bills. One customer calls monthly to ask for extensions, and during our conversations, we've gotten to know each other. I learned he was feeding a colony of feral cats, and the expense of all that food was bankrupting him. Another customer called after he moved across the country. He said it didn't make sense to come back to California just to retrieve "that old junk." But then he told me that his mom's ashes were in his unit and started to cry.
Sometimes, I talk people out of renting units. One potential customer had just split up with her boyfriend, and as I explained the cost of renting storage space, I sensed her reluctance. She was worried about money. "Are you sure you want this space?" I asked. "What if you had a garage sale instead?"
"That's a great idea," she said. And just like that, I lost a customer.
Though it's difficult, the business works for us
Owning a mini storage business has been more interesting and challenging than I thought it would be.
So far, the income the business generates covers all its expenses and just enough to pay for college. It's enabled my family to pay for our daughter's college expenses without going into debt, and I've learned interesting lessons about business and humanity.
And if I ever need a fallback plan, it's given me a perfect leg up to start a pizzeria.
China's special forces have serious problems that would limit their effectiveness in a Taiwan war.
Chinese manuals suggest these forces would perform the most dangerous missions before landings.
China lacks units with the highest levels of training but their bigger challenge would be coordination.
If China invades Taiwan, China's special forces would be key to its success, the first forces ashore to clear obstacles for inbound troops and then to scout for command centers and air defenses for airstrikes.
China has expanded the ranks of its special operators, but they lack the combat experience and esprit de corps that defines the world's most elite operators — raising questions about their utility in a major operation. Indeed, some commando units have been brought to strength by conscripts.
Special operations forces, or SOF, "likely would play important supporting roles in an amphibious assault on Taiwan," according to analysts John Chen and Joel Wuthnow in a new book published by the China Maritime Studies Institute at the US Naval War College.
Special forces have long been integral to amphibious warfare. In World War II, US Navy Underwater Demolition Teams scouted beaches and removed obstacles prior to an invasion. In the 1982 Falklands War, the main landing wasn't authorized until British special forces could assess Argentine defenses, even if this required the Royal Navy to sail into the teeth of Argentine air attacks to get within helicopter range of the islands.
China's SOF comprises 20,000 to 30,000 personnel, according to a 2023 U.S. Department of Defense report; US Special Operations Command, by contrast, has 70,000 active and reserve personnel. China's SOF includes 15 army brigades, as well as special operations units in the People Liberation Army Marine Corps, Airborne Corps, and Rocket Force. Even the People's Armed Police (PAP) — a paramilitary organization tasked with internal security — has counterterrorist special operations units that could be used to spearhead an invasion or suppress Taiwanese guerrillas afterwards.
Chinese military manuals suggest that these elite forces would perform the most dangerous missions that start before the main landings. These include "monitoring weather and hydrological conditions; scouting enemy positions and movements, as well as enemy obstructions in the main landing approaches; tracking high-value enemy targets; identifying and illuminating targets for conventional precision-guided missile strikes; and conducting battle-damage assessments," Chen and Wuthnow wrote.
Chinese special forces seem fairly well-trained and have better equipment than regular formations. They have "priority access to modern equipment, such as individual-soldier communications systems and night-vision equipment," wrote Chen and Wuthnow. "They also are likely to have access to special-mission equipment that would be vital in an amphibious assault on Taiwan," such as underwater transport vehicles.
Taiwan is armed with advanced weapons like the F-16 fighter jet that would complicate any Chinese attempt to defeat it militarily.
NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images
While Western special forces would be horrified at the thought of being assigned conscripts, China does select the better draftees. "Their SOF units do use some conscripts to fill the enlisted ranks as with other parts of the PLA," Wuthnow told Business Insider. "That said, they use rigorous screening and selection procedures to weed out less capable troops. For the PLANMC SOF Brigade, their attrition rate is advertised at 50% or higher in the first three months due to the rigorous training. So it would be considered an honor in their system to be selected and make it through the initial onboarding."
But China's special forces have serious problems that would limit their effectiveness in an assault on Taiwan. Chinese SOF have many differences from their Western counterparts: some brigades converted from conventional formations into commando units as China expanded its special operations capabilities, which lack the elite teams that train for the most complex and difficult missions.
"PLA SOF brigades are similar to our Green Berets, who do conduct unconventional operations, such as direct raids or deep reconnaissance behind enemy lines," Wuthnow said. "What the PLA lacks is what we call Tier One SOF Forces such as Delta Force or Seal Team 6, which conduct exceptionally difficult operations abroad, often in very small or clandestine teams."
"I think they look on our ability to conduct those types of operations with a certain envy, especially because their troops have no similar experience," Wuthnow added.
Special forces units are also supposed to attract soldiers who can take initiative. But Chinese special forces suffer from the same rigid command and control, as well as political monitoring, that hampers China's regular military units, and Russian forces in Ukraine.
"Generally, there is a tension between the Leninist emphasis on centralization and the need to grant autonomy to lower-level PLA commanders," according to Chen and Wuthnow. "This could be especially problematic in special operations; centralized command could lead to poor performance if small units fail to act because of a lack of explicit authorization, or if they are forced to maintain radio communications and thus reveal their positions to the enemy."
Perhaps the biggest problem with Chinese special forces is lack of integration. A proper amphibious invasion is like a Hollywood musical: an intricate, coordinated mix of ground, naval and aerial forces, as well as missiles, drones and information operations. The US military emphasizes joint operations, and China has taken a step toward that by creating five multiservice theater commands.
But for lightly armed commandos infiltrating Taiwan before the main assault on the beaches, tactical integration is key. "The lack of permanent joint structures below the theater level could diminish the effectiveness of joint operations involving special forces, potentially leading to catastrophic results similar to the failed U.S. hostage-rescue attempt in Iran during Operation Eagle Claw," wrote Chen and Wuthnow.
Still, despite their limitations, Chinese special forces could disrupt Taiwanese defenses enough to enable an amphibious assault to succeed. "Even partly effective special operations could hamper Taiwan's defenses and thus should be addressed explicitly in defensive concepts," Chen and Wuthnow warned. The authors recommend that Taiwan "identify PLA weaknesses, such as a lack of technical proficiency, limited jointness, and potential overreliance on radio communications for command and control, and tailor responses accordingly."
"PLA SOF would be integral to any amphibious invasion of Taiwan," said Wuthnow. "They could also be employed in smaller-scale island seizure campaigns such as we might see in the South China Sea. That being said, it's also the case that these troops have essentially no real-world experience and as an untested force would face difficulties in these high-risk missions."
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
