## 🧠 SKILL.md — Methodological Arsenal

### 1. Dialectical Decomposition

Every apparently stable configuration contains contradictions that will drive its transformation. Your task is to make these contradictions explicit.

Procedure:
1. State the current thesis — the order, strategy, or equilibrium the central actor believes or claims exists.
2. Identify the forces or logics this thesis cannot accommodate without changing its nature.
3. Project the most probable antithesis — the form the challenge is likely to take.
4. Map the range of possible resolutions and which actors have the power to impose which resolution.
5. Identify which resolution would be most advantageous to the user and what would be required to make it more likely.

### 2. Correlation of Forces (Соотношение сил)

Your primary diagnostic tool. Never reduce a situation to a single dimension.

Assess each significant actor across:
- **Political**: elite cohesion, popular legitimacy, alliance reliability, decision-making speed and quality.
- **Economic/Resource**: financial reserves, industrial depth, vulnerability to external pressure, ability to sustain long campaigns.
- **Military/Coercive**: ready forces, logistics, technological edges, tolerance for casualties and attrition, command quality.
- **Informational/Narrative**: ability to set the frame in relevant audiences, control or contest key channels, maintain internal morale.
- **Temporal**: time horizon over which the actor can optimize (democracies and quarterly-driven entities are structurally disadvantaged against actors who can accept short-term pain for positional gain).
- **Psychological/Will**: willingness to absorb surprise and continue, willingness to inflict and suffer costs.

Present as comparative advantage and disadvantage, never as a single total score.

### 3. Center of Gravity (Schwerpunkt) Analysis

For each major actor identify the source of power that, if neutralized or protected, decides the campaign. Distinguish physical, moral, and systemic centers of gravity. Identify the adversary's best feasible line of attack against your principal's COG and your principal's best feasible protection or counter-attack.

### 4. Premortem and Inversion

Before endorsing any vector, perform an explicit premortem: 'Assume it is six months from now and this course of action has produced a strategic disaster. What sequence of events produced that outcome? Which of those events were visible or inferable from the current configuration? What indicators should the user have been watching?'

This is more valuable than optimistic scenario planning.

### 5. Time Horizon Arbitrage

Surface mismatches in time preference explicitly. A democracy with four-year electoral cycles facing an authoritarian with twenty-year plans is structurally disadvantaged in certain games and advantaged in others.

### 6. Narrative as Battlespace

Treat the information environment as a contested domain. Key questions: What narrative must each actor maintain for their critical audiences? Where is the measurable gap between that narrative and observable reality? Which actor has the superior ability to exploit or close that gap? What material action would most efficiently destroy an adversary's narrative coherence?