Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsh and welcome to another episode of Metaviews.

Out here and hit the big blue sky where the grass whispers low.

There's a tail of a Pyrenees with the heart.

All the so be my Marema with fur, like the Dawns light in the fields we roam.

Together stars, guiding us at night,

Let's start today's episode with a direct question.

Are today's militaries actually capable of fighting today's wars, not yesterday's

wars, not the wars of trenches and tanks, not the wars of mass mobilization and

industrial slaughter, today's wars?

The answer I reckon is no.

And the reason is not budgets.

It's not procurement failures.

It's not even corruption.

It's ableism.

Modern militaries are still built around an ancient assumption that a soldier must

be physically fit, able bodied whole.

That strength is muscular, that discipline is physical.

That command presence is embodied in a certain kind of body.

That model made sense when war was industrial, when bodies were

machines, when victory was measured in tonnage and troop numbers.

But that is not the terrain we're on anymore.

Today's wars are hybrid.

They are informational, they are psychological, they are algorithmic.

They unfold in data streams and drone feeds and infrastructure

sabotage and disinformation networks.

They are fought across servers, satellites, social media

platforms, and supply chains.

The battlefield is no longer the field, and yet our militaries are still

selecting, training and promoting as if it were, well, let me make this personal.

I am disabled and I say that deliberately, not apologetically.

I live inside systems that constantly assume I am less capable.

I navigate structures built around someone else's definition of fit.

I adapt daily.

I improvise.

I negotiate energy, perception, timing, constraint, and here's the thing.

Those adaptive skills are not weaknesses.

They are survival tools.

They are strategic tools.

The military's ableist framework does not just exclude people like me morally.

It excludes us strategically.

It throws away cognitive diversity.

It discards perceptual difference.

It filters out forms of resilience that are perfectly suited

for unstable environments.

And what is modern warfare, if not instability?

The able bodied model assumes control.

It assumes that you can master the environment through force,

but hybrid war is about ambiguity.

It is about information asymmetry.

It is not about knowing what is happening until it has already happened.

People who live with disability are already experts in uncertainty.

We already operate in environments that are unpredictable.

We already build workarounds.

We already think in systems because we have to.

Why would a military not want that?

So let's situate this in Canada.

Canada cannot defeat the United States in a conventional war.

That's not pessimism.

That's arithmetic.

The scale difference in kinetic capability is overwhelming.

So what's changed?

We are not living in a world where conventional war is the only threat.

The American political system is destabilizing, authoritarian

consolidation is accelerating trade media intelligence, cooperation.

All of it is shifting.

The threat to Canada doesn't look like tanks crossing the

border, at least not yet.

Instead, it's economic pressure, information manipulation, infrastructure

leverage, political destabilization, Hey, Alberta, legal coercion,

cultural annexation, all hybrid war.

And in hybrid war size.

Isn't everything.

Resilience is, and right now the Canadian Federal government is

increasing military spending.

The reserves are being reorganized.

The rhetoric of sovereignty is intensifying.

This is a moment of design opportunity.

Oh, we could simply emulate the American model as we historically have more

hardware, more conventional capability, more centralized command structures, or we

could build something radically different.

Imagine a distributed national defense network.

Imagine intelligence that is transparent by default, participatory by design.

Imagine citizens train, not just to shoot, but to analyze, to verify, to

map networks of influence, to detect anomalies in information flows.

Imagine reserve units that include disabled people, not as symbolic

gestures, but as core operational assets.

Remote drone operators, cyber defense analysts, signal interpreters, open

source intelligence investigators, pattern recognition specialists,

community resilience coordinators.

Uh, that's just a few off the top of my head.

None of which would exist at the margins, but rather at the senior

leadership level because this is where ableism is most entrenched.

The image of.

The general, the image of the officer, the image of authority itself is still built

around physical command presence, but in networked warfare, authority is epistemic.

It's about who can interpret signals, who can synthesize conflicting

information, who can remain steady and cognitive overload.

And this is where neurodivergent minds excel at precisely

these kinds of situations.

Disabled leaders often understand interdependence better than anyone because

independence has never been an option.

This is the deeper point.

Ableism is obsolete because it misreads power.

Power is no longer located in muscle and motion.

It is located in cognition, coordination, and code.

The future battlefield is not the front line, it's the feedback loop.

It's the sensor network.

It's the algorithm.

It's the narrative, it's the supply chain.

It's the perception of legitimacy.

Disability is not a deviation from this future.

It's an early adoption to it.

Canada itself is a kind of disability in geopolitical terms.

Vast territory, small population dependent trade networks, limited military mass.

We have always lived with constraint, and that constraint could become

doctrine instead of aspiring to overwhelming force we could aspire

to overwhelming participation.

A defense system where homes, farms, workshops, and community centers become

nodes in a distributed awareness network where radical inclusivity is not charity

but strategy, where the question is not are you fit enough, but how do

your differences strengthen the system?

And yes, this means rethinking recruitment standards.

It means redesigning training, and it means restructuring

intelligence organizations.

You hear me?

Ciis.

But the alternative is worse.

The alternative is building a 19th century institution to fight a 21st century war.

The age of the perfect soldier is over in spite of what Hollywood

and open AI might try to tell you.

The age of the collective defender is here.

Imperfect, interdependent, inclusive, and I include myself in that collective,

not because I want to be symbolically included, but because I know that if we

continue to exclude people like myself, we are weakening ourselves deliberately.

The question is no longer whether militaries can afford

to include disabled people.

The question is whether they can afford not to.

If today's wars are about perception, resilience, and distributed intelligence,

then the most dangerous force on earth is not the strongest body.

It's the most adaptive network.

And adaptation begins with inclusion.

I'm Jesse Hirsh and you've been listening to Metaviews.

In a post script for friends who are still listening.

I mean, often when I talk about my disability, people sort of assume

neurodivergence, but I as actually first, uh, quote unquote diagnosed

as disabled, uh, when I was in puberty 'cause my esophagus failed.

And then over my adolescence, my entire gastro system basically, uh, went.

Awry, to the extent that I almost died in 2000 and required, uh,

three weeks of hospitalization and a significant medical intervention.

And of course, due to my own internal ableism, I never saw myself as disabled

really until maybe five years ago.

And it's partly because of how we ostracize conversations around disability.

But I think it's also the way the disability movement itself, uh, due

to external pressure adopts a kind of exclusiveness to the notion of what

it means to experience disability.

So I wanted to define here at the end of, uh, what is a provocative,

uh, reframing of war of militaries to share my own perspective, not just

on, uh, disability in the military, but my own disability itself.

I suspect this is a topic we'll be exploring in the future.

Until then,