Critical Skills

Mercy Otis Warren had no vote, no public office, and no legal standing in the republic she helped build — and she still wrote the most rigorous Anti-Federalist pamphlet of 1788. Publishing under a pseudonym to keep her argument from being dismissed, Warren laid out 18 specific objections to the proposed Constitution. Her pamphlet helped create the demand for a Bill of Rights.
For more than a century, a man received the credit. This is her story.

In March 1955, a fifteen-year-old Black student named Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus — nine months before Rosa Parks. She was arrested, convicted, and quietly set aside by movement leaders who chose a more defensible face for the boycott. What history forgot is that Colvin was named as a plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the federal class-action lawsuit that actually ended bus segregation in Montgomery. She testified before a three-judge panel in May 1956. Her sworn account became part of the legal record on which the Supreme Court’s ruling rested. The victory that desegregated Montgomery’s buses carries Claudette Colvin’s name in the transcript. This is the story of how the movement’s most legally indispensable witness became its most forgotten one.

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.