Books by Tom Sotis
Exploring functionality, pressure, strategy, adaptability, violence, psychology, and human performance under stress.
Functional Under Pressure
Understanding Functionality Under Weapons-Based Violence
A philosophical manifesto for practitioners and instructors who prioritize adaptive functionality under pressure over rehearsal-based performance.
Functional Under Pressure explores what happens to timing, perception, accessibility, and decision-making when pressure, instability, resistance, and uncertainty are introduced into training and violence.
This book challenges many commonly accepted assumptions surrounding functionality, cooperative timing, pressure-testing, tactical bandwidth, recognition-driven training, and oppositional development. Rather than focusing on memorized choreography or staged movement, it examines the realities of performance under stress and the difference between what looks functional and what actually survives pressure.
Written for serious practitioners, instructors, and functionalists, this book serves as the philosophical foundation behind the AMOK methodology and its approach to training under instability.
The Way of Tactics
A Manifesto of Invincibility for Warriors • Executives • Athletes
Part personal reflection, part tactical philosophy, and part manifesto, The Way of Tactics explores adaptability, resilience, perception, and strategic thinking under pressure.
The book begins with a series of short stories and life experiences that shaped the author’s understanding of violence, adversity, preparation, and human behavior. These lessons become the foundation for a broader discussion on tactical thinking and the development of an adaptive mindset.
The second section presents the Manifesto of Invincibility, outlining the philosophical principles behind the AMOK methodology and its approach to awareness, pressure, adaptability, functionality, and survival.
The final section examines how these same principles apply beyond conflict and violence into athletics, leadership, business, competition, and everyday decision-making.
The Way of Tactics presents a philosophical approach to strategy, resilience, and performance in an unpredictable world.
Unbreakable Honor
Standing Firm in a Changing World
Unbreakable Honor explores honor as a guiding principle for navigating adversity, responsibility, integrity, and human behavior in an increasingly unstable world.
Rather than treating honor as reputation or appearance, the book examines it as an internal commitment to courage, loyalty, morality, accountability, and principled action under pressure.
The book explores the foundations of honor across personal life, relationships, leadership, public conduct, and culture, while also examining the modern challenges that erode integrity, conviction, and ethical clarity.
Written for individuals seeking greater purpose, resilience, character, and moral strength, Unbreakable Honor presents honor not as an outdated ideal, but as a practical framework for living with meaning, discipline, and conviction in a changing world.
The Protégé
The Training of a Contract Killer
The Protégé is a gripping exploration into the secretive and deadly world of professional killers, following the intense relationship between a seasoned assassin and his young protégé.
Blending psychological tension, tradecraft, violence, intelligence gathering, and tactical precision, the story explores the brutal realities behind the training, conditioning, and operational methods of those who live and work in the shadows.
Readers are taken deep into the worlds of surveillance, profiling, infiltration, psychological warfare, false alibis, forensic countermeasures, and the calculated planning that surrounds every contract.
More than a traditional assassin novel, The Protégé examines manipulation, discipline, survival, emotional control, and the psychological transformation that occurs when violence becomes profession, identity, and way of life.
Dark, immersive, and uncompromising, The Protégé presents a detailed and psychologically driven journey into the hidden world of contract killing.
