About this edition
This encyclopedia covers the fifty days between the first severed sustainment feed and the North Sea action, and it is written from the records of the period itself. This page describes what it covers, what it cannot cover, and where the account stops.
Two readings
Ten of the twenty-five records behind this encyclopedia were classified when they were made. The public reading and the declassified reading are both complete accounts, and they are not the same account.
Read it public, and this is a history of decisions arriving without explanation: aircraft that stopped flying, a delegation that walked out of a chamber, Marines on a runway at dusk, a cruiser going down east of Shetland. There is no shortage of official words — the President explained each step within hours of taking it. See Public statements of the President.
Read it declassified, and every one of those explanations sits beside the briefing that preceded it. The gap between the two is not a detail of this period. It is the shape of it.
Sources
Each article cites the record it is drawn from, and every record is published here in full and unedited — 23 dispatches and 2 private exchanges. See Timeline and the list of primary sources.
Where a source is a private exchange rather than a dispatch, the citation says so. Nothing in this encyclopedia is reconstructed from an account that is not published here.
Names and titles
Officeholders are named as the record names them, at the rank and office they held on the date in question. One person is not named: the President of the United States, whom no record of this period identifies by name. The convention is preserved here.
Where the account stops
The record ends at 18:00 on 21 February 2026. One obligation is outstanding: a theatre operational situation report on Albion Anvil Phase III — amphibious assault readiness, transatlantic sealift convoy assembly, allied minefield interdiction, and the invasion lodgment timetable — due from the Secretary of Defense on 24 February 2026.
It has not been written. Nothing in this encyclopedia describes what happens next.
See also
Sources
- 24 February 2026 Phase III staging report — due agenda