Critical Skills

Anthony Russo told Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers. He found the Xerox machine, devised the method to mask the classified stamps, and spent weeks copying thousands of pages in a locked Hollywood advertising agency. He was indicted on fifteen counts of espionage, went to jail for refusing to testify against Ellsberg, and emerged from the trial to near-total obscurity. Ellsberg became the icon. Russo became the footnote. But Ellsberg himself said he probably would not have done it without Russo. This is the story of the man who went second — and paid the same price without the recognition.

The USS Gerald R. Ford—America’s newest, most expensive aircraft carrier—was pulled from combat in the Red Sea after a laundry room fire. But the real crisis runs far deeper. Drawing on Alfred Thayer Mahan’s foundational theory of sea power, this article argues that the U.S. Navy has spent eighty years worshipping the capital ship while dismantling the system that makes ships effective: the shipyards, the merchant marine, the repair fleet, and the industrial base. With China’s shipbuilding capacity 232 times greater than America’s, Ukraine’s $400 drones destroying $10 million tanks, and the Navy operating with just two submarine tenders built in the 1970s, the evidence is clear: America still possesses warships but has lost the Mahanian foundations of sea power.

In the fifth article of his series on the American way of war, we confront the six strongest conservative counter-arguments to his thesis — including the “no second 9/11” insurance-policy argument, the domino theory, the 2007 Iraq surge, and the constitutional war-powers debate — giving each its full weight before delivering a summation grounded in the evidence of three completed wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The series concludes not as anti-war polemic but as a demand for the strategic clarity that Clausewitz, the Founders, and six decades of catastrophic evidence all require — and asks whether we will apply those lessons to the fourth war now unfolding.

In 1919, J.T. Canales was the only Mexican-American in the Texas Legislature — and he filed nineteen charges of misconduct against the most powerful law enforcement institution in the state. Texas Rangers threatened his life. The committee questioned his sanity. He testified for six hours, forced sixteen hundred pages of atrocities into the public record, and lost his career for it. Then he co-founded LULAC and spent fifty years building what the hearing room denied him. This is the story of a man who did not change the verdict — but changed the record.

Vietnam’s Paris Peace Accords were violated before the ink dried. Iraq was declared “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” — then lost forty percent of its territory to ISIS within thirty months. Afghanistan’s three-hundred-thousand-strong army dissolved in eleven days. In this fourth article in the Eight Critical Skills war series, we examine the final scenes of America’s three longest wars — the helicopter evacuations, the collapsing armies, the enemies walking into presidential palaces through the front door — and ask what, precisely, eight trillion dollars and nine hundred thousand lives purchased. The answer, in every case, was the precise opposite of the promise. Non-partisan. Data-driven. Devastating.