Index of Books: Macofs Military Maxims
Type: Books — Full Text (In-Universe Publication by Perold Jonas)
Status: Canon (confirmed by creator) — full text preserved
Overview
One of Perold Jonas's 40+ published books on warfare, and his most controversial. Per the creator: this is a first-year, first-semester primer for cadets at a military academy. It deliberately considers warfare only up to the technological level that existed prior to the development of AI and autonomous systems — which is part of why many career military officers view it as reductive or insulting to their profession, reducing years of dedicated training to a series of maxims, axioms, and anecdotes anyone who could read could understand.
256 total maxims across three parts:
- Part One — Maxims of Space Warfare (45 maxims)
- Part Two — Maxims of Land Warfare (90 maxims)
- Part Three — Maxims of Politics and Foreign Policy (121 maxims)
✅ See MACOFS Military Maxims: Reception & Publishing History for the full in-universe publishing story — three contemporary reaction pieces, a 6-month timeline of reactions, three forewords, an editor's note, and Jonas's own preface.
Each maxim has been organized into thematic categories and — critically — reordered within each category into genuine conceptual order (simplest/most foundational to most complex), not the numerical order the maxims originally appeared in. This required extensive collaborative review with the creator, since an earlier AI-assisted categorization pass had claimed to use conceptual ordering but was verified (by the creator) to have actually just sorted maxims numerically in most cases. Original maxim numbers are preserved throughout for reference.
Full Text
- Part One — Maxims of Space Warfare (10 categories)
- Part Two — Maxims of Land Warfare (11 categories)
- Part Three — Maxims of Politics and Foreign Policy (11 categories)
Notable Content
- Part Three opens with "A Prayer for Leaders" — Psalm 23 (King James Version), attributed in-universe to "King David, Terra, circa 1700 BC." This quietly reinforces that the Original Colonists carried real Earth religious/cultural texts with them, consistent with the Jonesboro Amendment's hidden preservation of Earth calendar conventions.
- Maxim 75 ("The Pattern of Dictatorship," Section 3) is one of the most substantial single maxims in the book — a detailed breakdown of how self-made despots exploit societal "upset" to seize and consolidate power.
- Section 3's maxims read consistently with what's known of Jonas's own military doctrine and career — see the "Jonas Connection" discussion below.
The Jonas Connection
Several reviewers of this archive have noted that Part Two (Maneuver Warfare & Operational Art) in particular reads like Jonas laying out his own operational doctrine at its most fundamental level — seize the initiative through maneuver, use velocity and mobility as core weapons rather than raw force size, create dislocation through shock and flanking, then ruthlessly exploit the resulting opportunity. This tracks with his real battlefield history (the swarming doctrine tested at the hypothetical Battle of Kila Vas; his decisive, asymmetric nuclear strike against Combin's forces to save the surviving Janastian Warhawks).
Appearances
- Creator-provided detail (uploaded .docx manuscript; categorization history from ChatGPT exports "Theme identification and categorization," "Theme identification process," and "MACOFS Military Maxims")
Open Questions
- What "MACOFS" in the title refers to precisely — whether Jonas wrote this before or after MACOFS's 2007 founding is not yet clarified