A Rebrand: Dead Reckoning
The world has changed, and we need to keep pace.
Close to two years ago, we started GeoMissives to spread a wider awareness of geostrategic considerations across multiple layers of thinking. And now we are going to rebrand.
The world has changed rapidly in the last 18 months, and we’ve realised that we need to be far more structured as the nature and means of threats used by adversaries to challenge democracies have expanded.
As Mark Carney argued at Davos, the world order has been ruptured; it will take imagination, creativity, and analytic rigour to challenge earlier assumptions, test options and build new strategies.
Our concerns have been further compounded as democracies themselves have erred time and again: the pull of the politics of inevitability, as Tim Snyder noted, can be insidious. The inertia of dated process and mindsets, plus short-sighted political considerations, have pulled democratic governments into quandaries they should have largely avoided had the heavy lifting of democratic practice and norms been maintained.
That said, we believe strongly there are opportunities available to those that are ready, and we are looking to help our readers see the wider picture and challenge dated orthodoxies for better outcomes.
It is these expanded angles that we feel makes a focussed shift necessary, as we reframe our analysis to assess strategy at the system, policy and national levels, in both hard and soft power formats.
From our perspective, the Indo-Pacific, increasingly tense over recent years, is largely lacking any ongoing analysis tying many of these factors together. Because we’re Australian, a good deal of our analysis will reflect an Australian, Indo-Pacific and Western point of view, but the lessons we’re highlighting apply more broadly.
Accordingly, we are splitting GeoMissives off from Geomastery Advisory and choosing to rename it ‘Dead Reckoning’.
Dead Reckoning is about using the available signs in the environment to keep on course. It’s about the human element that provides the steerage. It is navigation by calculation when instruments fail, when times are uncertain, and emerging risks need to be managed, requiring a mix of judgment and experience. And while that’s a serious business, because we’re Australian, we can’t take ourselves too seriously—it’s a cool name, after all.
(There’s an indubitable nautical element, since Australia, a large dry and dusty landmass, is an island and depends hugely on sea-lanes. Australia fronts onto two oceans: the Pacific and the Indian, and to its north is archipelagic Southeast Asia, the increasingly contested South China Sea and the first, second and third island chains.)
Nor is this transition from GeoMissives to Dead Reckoning the only step we are taking: it’s going to take more than a Substack publication (no offense Substack) to strengthen democratic stability as the post-Cold War mono-power order is shed for a more volatile era.
There will be more to come as we build out the platform: the National Defence Strategy calls for a ‘whole-of-nation approach’ to security and identifies democracy as fundamental to Australia’s approach; Dead Reckoning aims to provide the civic foundation those aspirations demand.
For that, we will need your support.
Democratic leadership, institutions and rigour have slipped, while autocracies further their own goals. If democracies want to survive, a reassessment of Australia’s strategic approach, at nearly every level, and a preparedness to join the debate and undertake the heavy lifting of democracy, is needed.
We would welcome your financial contribution. If you are interested in contributing in other ways, such as writing, let us know. We’ll be putting out further information about how we divide up and deliver content moving forward early next week, alongside beginning delivery itself.