Monthly Archives: August 2022

Serena Williamss fellow tennis professionals already know what their sport is like without her.

She has played very little in the past two years and has played just two singles matches in the past 13 months.

But as Williams, now 40 years old, made plain in announcing her impending retirement on Tuesday, it will very soon be time for the wider world to become accustomed to her absence from the courts, as well.

Tennis is a global game, which is a big part of its charm, and despite Williamss part-time status of late, if you ask anyone on just about any street to start naming womens tennis players, the first name most would produce would still be Serena Williams.

With her technically sound and forceful serve, she possessed perhaps the most decisive shot in the long history of the womens game. But there has been much more to her tennis: powerful, open-stance groundstrokes; exceptional and explosive court coverage; and a ferocious, territorial competitive drive that helped her overcome deficits and adversity throughout a professional career that has lasted a quarter century.

At her peaks and there were several she was one of the most dominant figures in any sport: able to overwhelm and intimidate the opposition with full-force blows and full-throated roars, often timed for maximum effect.

By force of serve and personality and long-running achievement, she has become synonymous with tennis while managing to transcend it as a Black champion with symbolic reach even if she long eschewed political or social commentary, in part because of her upbringing as a Jehovahs Witness. Years after Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe blazed trails for Black champions, Williams created new paths for modern athletes balancing competition and outside pursuits.

Her off-court world including acting, fashion design, venture capital, family life and motherhood most likely allowed her to remain fresh and competitive far longer than expected. And we are not just talking about the publics expectations. Her father and longtime coach, Richard Williams, clearly had vision: He dreamed up a far-fetched and ultimately right-on-target family plan for Serena and her older sister Venus to dominate womens tennis. But he also predicted that both would retire early to devote themselves to other endeavors.

Father did not know best in this instance. Both sisters have played into their 40s, displaying an undeniable love of the game that is rather surprising considering that they were given no choice in whether they would play it.

I got pushed hard by my parents, Serena Williams wrote in the Vogue essay released on Tuesday announcing her impending retirement. Nowadays so many parents say, Let your kids do what they want! Well, thats not what got me where I am. I didnt rebel as a kid. I worked hard, and I followed the rules.

She then talked about her 4-year-old daughter, Olympia. I do want to push Olympia not in tennis, but in whatever captures her interest, Williams said. But I dont want to push too hard. Im still trying to figure out that balance.

It is a delicate dance, and my suspicion is that many a tennis family has run aground trying to follow the Williams template, which included a cradle-to-tour focus on greatness but also extraordinarily no junior tournaments after age 12.

Thousands of lives probably went down the wrong path trying to follow that, said Rick Macci, the fast-talking coach who shaped the games of both Serena and Venus Williams in their youth under Richards watchful gaze. That playbook only worked for the sisters because they were both so amazingly competitive that they maybe did not need to play junior tennis. Other kids need to compete to learn how to win and how to lose.

Though the sisters will always be, in some manner, packaged together in the collective consciousness, it was Serena who grew up, as her father correctly predicted, to be the greater player.

Serena would go on to win 23 Grand Slam singles titles (for now) to Venuss seven, and to spend 319 weeks at No. 1 to Venuss 11 weeks. Serena says she takes no joy in that disparity, emphasizing that she would never have scaled such heights without her sisters high-flying example.

Without Venus, there would be no Serena, Serena once said.

It would come as no surprise if Venus, 42, soon joined Serena in retirement at some stage after the U.S. Open or if they decided to call it a career together in New York. But for now, only Serena has made it plain that the end is truly nigh and that to deploy her own rather endearing sneaker-dragging code for retirement she is evolving away from tennis.

She has certainly helped tennis evolve with point-winning power from all areas of the court; she has certainly helped society evolve with her willingness to change the dialogue about body image and strong women ferociously pursuing their goals. She has had the confidence to take risks, sometimes sartorial, like her French Open catsuit, and sometimes more profound, such as her decision to boycott the tournament in Indian Wells, Calif., after she was booed and her father said he heard racial slurs in 2001. Fourteen years later, she returned in the interest of bridging the divide and sending a message about second chances.

But it is her tennis that has spoken loudest the longest. The sport, like many sports, remains fixated on the debate about the greatest of all time, and Williams certainly belongs in the heart of the conversation. It is easy to believe that she, at her best with the same equipment, would have beaten any woman at their best.

But she was not nearly as consistent a winner in regular tour events as past womens champions like Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert and Steffi Graf.

Williams picked her spots, and her 73 tour singles titles rank her fifth on the Open Era career list. Navratilova won 167 singles titles and 177 doubles titles at a time when doubles was much more prestigious and widely played by the stars. Evert won 157 singles titles. Graf, who retired at 30 years old, won 107 and remained No. 1 for a record total of 377 weeks.

But Serena, who has amassed a womens record of $94.5 million in prize money, played at a time when the Grand Slam tournaments have become evermore the measuring stick of greatness and the focus of global interest and attention.

To her evident frustration, she remains one short of the record of 24 major singles titles, held by Margaret Court, a net-charging Australian who played when Grand Slam tournament fields were smaller and the womens game lacked the depth it possesses today.

But comparing across eras remains a particularly tricky task in tennis (non-Australian greats of the past often skipped the Australian Open altogether). Perhaps it is wisest not to seek a definitive answer.

Shes the greatest player of her generation, no doubt, Navratilova said.

That brooks no argument, and though tennis generations have a way of getting compacted to just a few years, Williamss greatness was genuinely true to the term. She is the only player to have won singles titles in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Ten of her Grand Slam singles titles came after age 30: more than any other player. She also reached four major singles finals after giving birth to Olympia.

She was fresh at 30, a lot fresher than other players and champions in the past, Navratilova said. We would have played a lot more matches at that point. But the physical issues meant that she had taken a lot of breaks.

That enduring excellence a tribute to Williamss deep drive, phenomenal talent and innate belief in her own powers will be a huge part of her legacy, no matter how far she advances in what is surely her final U.S. Open.

See the rest here:

Serena Williams Forced Her Way Into the Tennis History Books - The New York Times

Richard McMillin / iStock.com

The Atlantic recently referred to gasoline as the only product whose prices are advertised on big signs by the side of the highway.

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No other commodity not gold and not the wheat we use to make bread can compete with oils power to stoke geopolitical conflict, steer international trade and determine the foreign policies of nations. For most people, however, gas is just the stuff you set on fire to make your car go and no one likes when its expensive.

Gas prices had fallen for 51 days straight as of Aug. 5, providing sorely needed relief from their June highs above $5. But why did prices ever climb so high in the first place, whats making them fall now, and what has driven the cycles of high and low gas prices throughout history?

Economists tend to frame historical gas prices as being reactionary to the major social, political and economic events of their day. Common examples include:

International economic expert Mykola Volkivskyi, founder of the First International Ukrainian Foundation of Development and a former advisor to the committee chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament, believes its usually the other way around: Oil prices have more power to influence events than events have power to influence oil prices.

Today, the world is critically dependent on the stability of the energy market, Volkivskyi said. The slightest fluctuations in prices affect the cost of products, the currency market, the ratio of the money supply in the economy and the property status of the population. One cannot speak of a clear cause and effect, as if an increase in energy prices will lead to a revolution or the collapse of the state. Nor can it be said that some culminating event by itself has a significant effect on prices.

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That said, global events and gas prices have been influencing each other since the dawn of the automobile.

Oil prices fluctuate throughout the day, every day, but the history of gas prices in the United States can be loosely organized into four distinct periods.

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T. Three years later, the Supreme Court backed the governments breakup of John D. Rockefellers Standard Oil which owned 90% of the countrys refineries and pipelines into the companies that would become Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco and Conoco.

It was the beginning of an era defined by low inflation and remarkably steady gas prices, which held within a penny or two of $0.20 for decades between the 1920s and the end of World War II.

The Allied victory in World War II ended the era of rock-steady gas prices that had defined the past two-plus decades. The economy absorbed an avalanche of pent-up consumer demand and the price at the pump rose but a more consequential story was playing out far away.

According to NPR, America started on the path to foreign dependence the moment the worlds largest oil reserves were discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938. A flood of cheap foreign oil fueled the postwar boom but it came at a price.

A region of the world that most Americans back then couldnt have pointed to on a map held sway over the price of gas in the United States for the eight decades that followed.

A new geopolitical force emerged when Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela formed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960.

Many factors contributed to the economic and political turmoil of the 1970s, but none more so than OPECs oil embargo and the energy crisis it created.

The era of cheap energy that had defined the 1950s and 60s oil often cost less than $1 per barrel ended in 1973. That year, OPEC initiated an oil embargo that cut America off from the crude supply that it had come to depend on. The embargo was retaliation for Americas support of Israel against its Arab neighbors in the 1967 and 1973 wars. It laid the groundwork for the now-famous images of endless lines of cars snaking into filling stations that had run out of gas.

In 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran created a second energy crisis and, when the dust settled, gas prices had tripled over the course of the decade and the Middle East was a powerhouse.

According to NPR, most Americans at that time believed that the gas they pumped into their cars still came from American oil fields, as it had in the time of Henry Ford. The decades events served as a reality check: Adversarial foreign nations now had the power to cripple the American economy at will by manipulating its oil supply.

Starting in the late 1970s, the global market was flooded with newly discovered oil from non-OPEC sources, including Alaska, Siberia, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, India and Brazil. By 1981, non-OPEC countries were outproducing OPEC, which lost control over global supply and prices.

The bottom dropped out of the oil market and gasoline was dirt cheap once again starting in the late 1980s. Although prices rose incrementally in the 21st century, there was no repeat of the 1970s energy shock until the price of gas breached $5 per gallon in June 2022.

Today, America produces 16.59 million barrels of oil per day compared to Saudi Arabias 10.95 million, making the United States both the largest producer and the largest consumer of oil in the world.

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Andrew Lisa has been writing professionally since 2001. An award-winning writer, Andrew was formerly one of the youngest nationally distributed columnists for the largest newspaper syndicate in the country, the Gannett News Service. He worked as the business section editor for amNewYork, the most widely distributed newspaper in Manhattan, and worked as a copy editor for TheStreet.com, a financial publication in the heart of Wall Street's investment community in New York City.

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The History of Gas Prices in the US - GOBankingRates

Its hard to argue that the introduction of the NextGen car hasnt been a success for the NASCAR Cup Series. There have been 15 different race winners through the 23 races run so far this season. While the rule book is new and new teams have been able to find their way to victory lane the NextGen regulations were built atop a foundation from almost 75 years of competition. NASCAR has recently released a short video to illustrate how the sanctioning body got to this point, as told by the people who lead the sport on and off the track.

The Evolution of Stock Car to Race Car: Seven generations of NASCAR race cars explained

The 17-minute video features archival footage, studio footage of surviving historic vehicles and interviews with prominent figures from NASCARs history. With these parts, viewers are guided through the seven generations of NASCAR stock car and, indirectly, a brief history of the sport. The early portion of the video somewhat romanticizes NASCARs first two decades, but its reasonably well-balanced when discussing the two generations of stock car before the NextGen. Despite being produced by NASCAR, the Car of Tomorrow and the Gen6 are fairly criticized for their flaws. The CoT was derided for initially featuring a rear wing and the body that was basically uniform between manufacturers. The Gen6 sparked a costly spending war fueled by a search for marginal advantages.

The video concludes by contextualizing the NextGen car within the history of NASCAR. This current generation of machinery continues the push for bodywork similar to road cars started in the sixth generation harkening back to the original age of stock cars. But underneath the bodywork, the NextGen car is effectively a purpose-built racing car reaching the end goal that Cup Series teams have unintentionally been pushing towards for decades.

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NASCAR Retells 7 Generations of Stock Car History in 17 Minutes - Jalopnik

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

I am appalled at the intentional cruelty and shocking incompetence that drove the Trump administrations family-separation tragedy.

But first, heres more from The Atlantic.

Welcome to the week, and allow me to introduceor reintroducemyself to you. Im Tom Nichols, a staff writer here at The Atlantic, where Im also the proprietor of the Peacefield newsletter. If youre a regular Daily reader, you might remember that I authored this newsletter in June; Im back, and Ill be writing the Daily most days of the week. Along with some of my Atlantic colleagues, Ill be sharing thoughts and analysis about the days news and other issues.

I write, among other things, about the perilous state of democracy in the United States and around the world. Today, I urge you to read The Atlantics new cover story by my colleague Caitlin Dickerson about the origins and consequences of the disastrous decision by President Donald Trump and his advisers to curtail illegal immigration by instituting a brutal family-separation policy in which childrenincluding infants and toddlerswere intentionally taken from their parents.

Caitlins intense and detailed examination shows that the family-separation policy was not a misunderstanding, or a bureaucratic error, or some sort of overzealous interpretation of otherwise sensible rules. It was, as one government figure told her, evil, and intentionally so: The goal of the policy was to pull children from their parents at the border as a deterrent, to inflict so much pain on people trying to enter the United States illegally that no one would be brave or tough enough to keep trying to do it.

Heartbreaking stories of children torn from their parents and then subjected to inhumane detention conditions should afflict the conscience of any decent person. But Americans should also be enraged by the completely dysfunctional nature of their own government. Even if you believe in taking a tough stand against illegal immigration (as I do) the combination of moral rot and bureaucratic incompetence produced outcomes that were far worse than the policys designers expectedand they already expected it to be bad.

When Trump officials such as Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions finally got the family-separation policy under way, the immigration systems courts, shelters, and other assets were almost instantly overwhelmed by a flood of traumatized children. The fallout was so awful and so obvious that soon, even Trumps people began to backpedal away from it. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsenwho spoke with Caitlin on the recordadmitted that she did not understand how bad the situation would get and that she regretted caving to the pressure to sign the order.

The family-separation nightmare is what can happen when zealots who have no idea what theyre doing get control of the levers of a gigantic and powerful government. Not only were Trumps aides clueless about how the immigration system worked, but they took pride in their ignorance and saw any attempt to inject facts or caution into the debate as a sign of weakness. Theres this worship of process, one member of Millers team said. Process, process, process. Process is code for We can slow down the quick impulses of a fiery political administration with no experts. Well, thats not what was voted for.

The public never votes for process, but thats how governments work, and it is how, in a system of separated powers, policies are formed, funded, and implemented. But immigration was merely one of many areas in which the Trump White House regarded the Constitution and federal law as little more than annoyances. At one point, according to the notes of a senior DHS official, Trump told Chief of Staff John Kelly to tell Nielson to, Round them all up and push them back into Mexico. Who cares about the law.

According to this officials notes, silence followed.

This silence was part of a persistent cowardice among senior figures in the U.S. government. Opponents of the policy thought that the system, or the courts, or the person in the next office down the hall would somehow stop the cruelty. But the people who wanted to do the right thingor, at the least, knew how the immigration system actually workedwere shouted down by low-level minions such as Katie Waldman (who was soon to be Mrs. Stephen Miller). This kind of bullying, Caitlin writes, was part of an administration plagued by insecurity and imposter syndrome. Whether out of misplaced loyalty or fear of professional repercussions, the professionals just took it. They made me lie, claimed one government official who misled Caitlin when she was reporting an earlier story about the policy.

This remarkable article is a cautionary tale for Americans and other citizens of democratic nations, a story of a political monkeys paw. When people vote for incompetent and cowardly leaders to execute policies founded on ignorance and cruelty, they will get what they asked forto their shame and regret.

Related:

Join Caitlin Dickerson and Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg for a live discussion about the secret history of the U.S. governments family-separation policy on August 12 at 2 p.m. ET. Register here.

Fish Oil Is Good! No, Bad! No, Good! No, Wait

By Jacob Stern

At first, it was all very exciting. In 1971, a team of Danish researchers stationed on Greenlands northwest coast found that a local Inuit community had remarkably low levels of diabetes and heart disease. The reason, the researchers surmised, was their high-marine-fat dietin other words, fish oil. Incidence of heart disease, which once afflicted relatively few Americans, had shot up since the turn of the century, and here, seemingly, was a simple solution. I remember how exciting those studies were when they first came out, Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition and food studies at NYU, told me. The idea that there were populations of people who were eating fish and were protected against heart disease looked fabulous.

Read the full article.

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Read. Hotel Earth, a poem from our September issue.

Watch. Netflixs The Sandmanespecially if youre a fan of the original comic books.

Play our daily crossword.

The launching of the Webb space telescope has, for many of us, rekindled a fascination with space. I feel it, and Im now binge-watching two television shows about it: The Star Trek series Strange New Worlds on Paramount+, and the Apple TV+ series For All Mankinda what if alternate history of the Cold War space race. Both of them are throwbacks to a time in the late 1960s when Americans took the conquest of space as their birthright, a natural extension of our technological optimism and can-do approach to the world. I wont spoil the major plotlines of either for you, but I recommend them both. I miss the days when Americans were space pioneers, and now that the Russians have threatened to pull out of international space cooperation with the United States, I hope that the Americans take up the challenge of space once again.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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The Secret History of Family Separation - The Atlantic

Editors Note: Do not miss the first part of this essay.

We hope, to paraphrase Santayana, that we are not doomed to repeat our alternative histories. That is our purpose as an answer to those who might ask why we engaged in this exercise when we know what really happened. The first part of our story about how the Army might have modernized as the final drawdown began during the Vietnam War shows the inclination of vested interests, wittingly or unwittingly, to draw lessons that support that they are on the right track. We believe that this fictional step back provides a useful, and perhaps cautionary, lens through which to view how the U.S. military might approach identifying and assessing lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War.

In some ways, the alternative history we pose is where we find ourselves today. The ongoing modernization efforts in the U.S. military began in response to a policy change the pivot to Asia or to aggression without any direct threat to the United States the 2014 Russian takeover of Crimea and its encroachment into Eastern Ukraine. Nevertheless, they served an important institutional purpose in shifting the mindset of the force from its near-total focus on counterinsurgency to peer warfare as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were clearly winding down.

Furthermore, U.S. capabilities and preparations during the Afghan and Iraq Wars focused on, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insisted, current war demands, even if it means straining the U.S. armed forces and devoting less time and money to future threats. The Defense Department, particularly the Army, found itself in a circumstance similar to that of the Army at the end of the Vietnam War, in that they had lost a generations worth of technical modernization there while gaining a generation of nearly irrelevant combat experience. The U.S. military realized that it had to look to the future.

Our alternative history just pushes the timeline back from 1973 to 1970. It assumes that the Army realized that it had to do something to demonstrate relevance as the United States began withdrawing from Vietnam and in the face of a new national strategy with less demand for the Army. The 1967 Six-Day War was the perfect case study, for similar reasons that the later 1973 conflict offered: preparation for the defense of NATO. The clear difference is that the 1967 war was an Israeli triumph that never called into significant question U.S. capabilities. Consequently, it did not create the demand for introspection and the sense of urgency that an Israeli near-defeat did in 1973.

In the face of the 1973 war, the Army would have had two choices: view it through an unobstructed lens in an attempt to understand what might be wrong with its new approach, or utilize the conflict to validate the decisions it had already made. The validation approach is simultaneously more satisfying and less risky than seeing ones own errors in the mistakes of either side in the war. First, validation shows all the hard work has been paying off. We are on the right track. Second, findings that question the current path put the credibility of the institutions and senior leaders who determined that course at risk. They can also challenge the significant investments made in programs that might be deemed irrelevant to the wars lessons.

Now, we turn our attention to the allure of validation in the case of Ukraine. Additionally, we offer recommendations on how to analyze the war in Ukraine in a way that incorporates service perspectives to achieve a joint solution that puts the Department of Defense clearly in the lead.

What Has Any of This Got to Do with the War in Ukraine?

The creation of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 1970 would have created strong biases that could have skewed the key lessons from the 1973 War. The reputation of the Army as an institution, not to mention those of its most senior leaders, was at stake. This is not to say that their behavior was disingenuous. It was not. It is, however, a warning that well-meaning leaders who deeply believe in the results of their hard work are hard to convince that their efforts are wrong, even in the face of new evidence. This is particularly true if the new reality could upend hard-won gains in the budget battles or service relevance.

With the war in Ukraine ongoing, the services now find themselves in a 1973 moment again. One option, as alternative history, uses the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine to validate its ongoing efforts to prove its relevance in a large-scale war and justify its investments. The Army is heavily invested in the lessons of 2014, modeling itself, it believes, on the services approach during the 1970s. In 2018, it created a new four-star headquarters U.S. Army Futures Command assuming from U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command the responsibility for concept development, organizational design, and materiel modernization.

U.S. Army Futures Command notes with justifiable pride what it has accomplished since its inception in July 2018:

The Army is nearly four years into the biggest transformational change since the early 1980s, modernizing and building a multi-domain-capable force that delivers speed, range, and convergence of emerging technologies.

What has resulted is a new concept multi-domain operations and several large materiel development efforts that span the key deficiencies the Army believes it needs to correct for large-scale combat operations. All of these initiatives began years before the current war in Ukraine. Indeed, the multi-domain operations concept, now being turned into doctrine, predates U.S. Army Futures Command itself, having first been published by U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2017 as Multi-Domain Battle: Evolution of Combined Arms for the 21st Century, 2025-2040.

The unique challenge the Army faces in its current effort at transformation is that it must now prepare for two very different peer competitors: China and Russia. Russia, a land power, is seemingly right up the Armys alley. China, however, is a harder case in which to demonstrate Army relevance. This is the key difference between now and the 1970s: The United States faces two very different peer competitors in widely separated theaters. The last time such a reality faced the United States was during World War II, with operations against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. It is an open question whether or not multi-domain operations and related materiel development efforts are equally suited against Russia and China.

This is particularly important to the Army because the clear policy of the United States is that China is the greatest long-term threat to American security and the nations most difficult military challenge. Furthermore, the prevailing and deep belief in the Army is that you cannot have two different armies at the same time. Apparently, this remains the belief even in the face of the radically different military problems posed by Russia and China based on their place, the specific adversary, and that adversarys capabilities. We believe that the Army can play an important combat role in the Pacific if it looks beyond its current preconceptions while also taking a long view of what might be possible in the deeper future.

We believe that it is too early to draw lessons learned from Ukraine or, for that matter, the earlier Nagorno-Karabakh War that received so much attention before Ukraine. A clear example of why rigorous analysis is necessary before jumping to premature conclusions was the rush during both of those conflicts to proclaim the end of the role of the tank on future battlefields. A representative article asserted that the annihilation of Russian mechanized formations in Ukraine where the power of the defense and the lethality of light infantry armed with modern anti-tank weapons [e.g., Javelins and Switchblades] defeated Russias assaults.

Ironically, this is not dissimilar to what happened in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the Sagger anti-tank guided missile was widely touted as signaling the death knell of the tank. In this case, the obituary was premature. The Israelis and other armies fielded better armor and improved their combined arms tactics, thus providing technical and tactical solutions to guarantee tank survivability.

In the 2006 Second Lebanon War, the Kornet anti-tank guided missile with its dual-warhead wreaked havoc on Israeli tanks. Once again, this was the end of tank warfare. However, just like after the 1973 war, the solutions were technical and tactical. The Israelis fielded the Trophy active protection system to protect against the weapons. They also reemphasized combined arms tactics and high-intensity warfighting skills, after years of focusing on irregular warfare, to improve their ability to suppress Hezbollah weapons and fighters.

There are likely similar solutions for the lessons about tank survivability in the face of drones and light anti-tank weapons. A technical solution would be the extension of a Trophy-like system to defeat top attack weapons. Tactically, competent execution of combined arms to suppress drone and anti-tank guided missile locations and defeat enemy light infantry enhance tank survivability and utility. This was something the Israeli forces were not trained for in 2006 and, as we are seeing in Ukraine, nor are Russian forces.

Investments in tank survivability were made because only the manned tank at this point in time provides mobile, protected lethality to enable maneuver on the battlefield. That may not be true in the future, but it is now. It is not yet the age of drones and light anti-tank weapons.

This case regarding a single weapon system highlights the importance of actually learning lessons from a war. The aforementioned article that argued the vulnerability of tanks in Ukraine was made to buttress the already-made decision to rid the Marines of their tanks. That decision was made before the war, based on the reality that the modernized Army M1 Abrams tanks the Marines had employed had become too heavy to be of use in Marine concepts.

Finally, learning lessons effectively includes attending to what really happened, especially from the perspective of Ukraine. A senior advisor to Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, emphasized that although anti-tank missiles slowed the Russians down what killed them was our artillery. That was what broke their units. Ongoing operations in Eastern Ukraine buttress this observation about the significant role of artillery.

One should not impute any malice to conclusions about the value of anti-tank weapons and the possible end of the tank, but this case shows that one has to be aware that there is a strong proclivity to look for lessons that support already-made decisions. For example, senior Army leaders were confidently noting as early as May that its massive modernization effort, which predated the Russian invasion and ranges from helicopters to secure communications, has been validated by the conflict.

Initial assessments about drones in the Nagorno-Karabakh, which seemingly foreshadowed a revolution in military affairs, become less dire in the face of deeper analysis as well, as seen in an article by Israeli analyst Edo Hecht:

For decades the Israeli army has been used to fighting without looking up to see whose aircraft was rumbling overhead, knowing with virtually 100% certainty it was Israeli. It can no longer be certain of that and must prepare to operate under unfriendly skies air defence [sic] forces and ground forces, even of armies that have advanced air forces, must take into account and prepare to meet a new threat that enables poorer and even primitive military forces to create an aerial threat that did not exist before.

What lessons have been observed so far still await objective, rigorous analysis to understand their significance. This will be difficult if the institutional imperative is to look for lessons that support and validate, rather than challenge current efforts. These decisions, based on premature, faulty assessments, can become baked in and not reexamined, given that they were proven in combat and are supportive of the current path.

Consequently, the Ukraine war lessons-collection process is important enough that it should be a priority of the Department of Defense to get it right. The services will understandably look at the war from their own perspectives. That is to be expected and reasonable, because warfighting expertise in the various domains resides within the individual services. But the Department must also recognize that the services will apply filters, either wittingly or unwittingly, to many of their individual observations.

Indeed, at its extreme, a conflict may elicit very different conclusions and recommended solutions, depending on the service making the assessment. Here, another Army case is instructive.

During the interwar period, the branch chiefs held great authority over their branchs doctrine, personnel, and materiel requirements. The Air Force had not yet gained its independence and was a branch of the Army. In February 1942, Maj. Gen. John Herr, the U.S. Army chief of cavalry, met with Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall. He truly believed what he told Marshall: In the interest of National Defense in this crisis, I urge upon you the necessity of an immediate increase in horse cavalry. From his perch, and with the experience of a full and successful career, Herr viewed horse cavalry as a key reason for German successes in Poland and France. He honestly believed what he told Marshall, and Germany did have cavalry formations. Thus, if you looked for validating observations, you could find them and laud their importance.

The other Army branches also searched for supportive lessons from these early German successes. The chief of infantry highlighted the contributions of German infantry, while the Army Air Corps contended that the strategic bombing of Warsaw had been central to the German victory over Poland. Finally, the chief of the newly formed Armored Force, who was basing his concepts largely on the cavalry tactics he had developed in the 7th Cavalry Brigade (Mechanized), saw the use of tanks by the Germans as a validation of his approach.

They all missed the reality of the blitzkrieg because it combined armor and air power. Indeed, the Armored Force doctrinal manuals did not require air support for operations. Consequently, the Army, less the disbanded horse cavalry, took its existing concepts and weapons into the war where they suffered unnecessarily for their parochial decisions. However, it is important to understand that all of these senior officers believed their validating observations. It would be difficult to expect them to see and believe something that conflicted with what they had spent their careers mastering.

There is also a positive lesson to be drawn from how the Army dealt with the lessons of the Yom Kippur War, in that it is a good model of how to ensure interservice collaboration on assessing and institutionalizing lessons from the Ukraine War. In 1973, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command and U.S. Air Force Tactical Air Command began a decade-long process to reach an agreement on how to collaborate and eliminate redundancies in key service programs.

The resulting agreements between the two service chiefs were a recognition that neither service could independently solve the challenges the Soviets posed to NATO. Eventually, they agreed to 31 initiatives that permitted the fuller integration of air and land capabilities and concepts into AirLand battle. However, the 31 Initiatives effort was about much more than service capabilities integration or interdependence. Henceforth, each service would rely on the other for capabilities, and each eliminated programs for capabilities that they agreed the other service could better execute. Unfortunately, with the end of the Cold War, this interservice agreement dissolved and the Army and Air Force again went their own ways in the absence of the shared problem.

Given the scope of the challenges posed by China and Russia, we believe that a truly joint approach must be taken to ensure their resolution. The rationalization of service approaches into a joint warfighting concept is no longer sufficient. What is required is an overarching joint concept that serves as the blueprint for service contributions. Furthermore, this concept should respond to the unique needs of the combatant commands.

Where to?

The 31 Initiatives effort, albeit important, was a bi-service effort completed before the passage of the GoldwaterNichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act in 1986. Since then, the Joint Staff and the Joint Requirements Oversight Council have been statutorily charged with executing what was a voluntary, ad hoc collaboration between the Army and Air Force on the 31 Initiatives. This is ostensibly where joint concepts and capabilities are developed in support of the regional combatant commanders requirements. It is also the venue where service concepts and capabilities are supposed to be vetted to ensure they support the overall direction of the joint force.

In the absence of compelling national security threats, there has not been a forcing function to demand focused collaboration. Regrettably, what passed for jointness during operations in the aftermath of 9/11 against completely overmatched adversaries prompted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to deactivate the Joint Forces Command, which was essentially a joint U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.

Since the dissolution of the Joint Forces Command, the services have dominated the development of concepts and capabilities. They are ostensibly exercising their Title 10 authorities to train, organize, and equip the forces that they will provide to the combatant commanders to meet their operational requirements. As a result of the existing practice, the overall joint warfighting concept is an amalgamation of service concepts and capabilities, rather than a foundational concept that drives and integrates the services efforts.

This shortfall has been obvious in the wars the United States has fought since the demise of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the joint plan executed in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom could be simply characterized as: Army, stay on the left of the Euphrates; Marines, stay on the right; and Air Force, go where the Army and Marines allow. Each service exercised its own concept within its area of operations. Such a campaign plan was possible because a U.S. military designed and trained to fight the Soviet Union completely overmatched the Iraqis. In the case of Desert Storm, the resounding victory validated all the hard work done since the 1973 Yom Kippur war. There was little to be learned and it did not particularly matter given the reality that with the demise of the Soviet Union the U.S. military was without even a near-peer competitor.

Any inclination to understand the lessons of the lopsided defeat of the Iraqis in Operation Iraqi Freedom vanished with the onset of the post-victory insurgency. Consequently, the U.S. military has not thoroughly examined a large-scale conventional war between two closely matched adversaries since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. And the last time it analyzed its own combat against peer competitors that could challenge it in all the domains was in the aftermath of World War II.

The Ukraine war, as a harbinger of the potential realities of large-scale combat operations against a nuclear-armed state competitor, should serve as a catalyst to rejuvenate the role of the Secretary of Defense, the combatant commanders, and the joint staff.

We are generally averse to creating blue-ribbon panels or other committees to examine issues. That said, the United States is clearly at an inflection point. The war in Ukraine has shown that competition and conflict between major states are not theoretical or, unfortunately, unlikely. We should model the analysis and response to the Ukraine war on the spirit embodied in the 9/11 commissions charter. The commission to study the Ukraine war should be intergovernmental and directed under the auspices of the National Security Council.

The Department of Defense should clearly have representation on this commission. There is a unique military dimension to this war that demands introspection and analysis by the Pentagon. Accordingly, the secretary should establish an independent commission to examine the Ukraine war in detail. It should be co-chaired by the deputy secretary of defense and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its composition is extremely important. The commission must have hand-picked and thoroughly vetted senior-level representation from all the services as well as individuals extremely familiar with current service doctrine, concepts, and existing and envisioned capabilities. Only with this kind of representation can the commission view the war through the multiple lenses it will take to understand its implications for the entire, integrated joint force. One should expect that each lens will distill many of the observations in very different ways and often reflect a bias towards showing how each service believes it can uniquely solve the problem. This should be encouraged. The resolution of these varied perspectives will yield a better joint solution.

The question before the Department of Defense as it grapples with the implications of the Ukraine War is whether it will treat that conflict as it would have in 1973, based on an assessment of the 1967 Six-Day War as postulated in this alternative history? Or will it react to the Ukraine War as a conflict similar in consequence to what spurred its actual response to the 1973 war? If the former path is taken, one could reasonably expect military service leaders to mine any lessons to support and validate the hard work that is been done since the pivot to Asia and the initial 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea in Ukraine. If the latter, the Department of Defense can assess what needs to be done against a peer competitor to prevail in the future. The question before us is which path will be taken?

The stakes are high. To be sure, China and Russia are studying the Ukraine war, as they did perhaps more rigorously than the United States did in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm. While the United States took a victory lap, the Chinese and the Russian militaries looked at the war to understand our capabilities to not only close the gaps but to eventually surpass us. In short, the United States viewed post-Cold War conflicts as validation of existing concepts and capabilities, while our adversaries saw them as a crisis and a call for action.

One should recall that our assessment of Chinese and Russian forces in 2000 dismissed them as significant threats. This can be seen in the fact that they were not even one of the two major theater wars that served as the basis of the U.S. force-sizing construct. For those that believe that the Ukraine War shows the rank incompetence of Russian forces, we should remember that the Russian Army that was annihilated in the initial stages of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 was occupying Berlin in the spring of 1945. More recently, the 1994 First Chechen War was a disaster: In 2000 Russian forces occupied Grozny. Furthermore, the war in Ukraine is not over and could yet upend the varied predictions of its outcome. Russian forces are still in it and neither they nor Ukrainian forces show any signs of capitulation.

In our own history, we might recall that the American military that had its share of defeats at the beginning of World War II, learned from those defeats, and was occupying Germany and Japan as victors in 1945. The United States and Russia both learned hard lessons during World War II out of necessity: it was a war of survival.

Our sense is that great attention needs to be paid to understanding how Russia and China will learn from this war and matching ourselves up against what they have the potential to be in the future. Whatever emerging concepts and programmed capabilities are up to the challenge should be accelerated. Those that are not must be ruthlessly identified and modified or eliminated. Finally, if the Russo-Ukrainian War shows that we are not fully prepared for future competition and conflict with China and Russia, then we should be learning from it with the sense of urgency it deserves.

Our concern is that the policymakers, given the abysmal Russian performance, will see little to learn from the war beyond minor adjustments to existing concepts and capabilities. Furthermore, the American public may lose interest in the war and perhaps believe it less consequential than its effects on the important issues of inflation and the world food supply. Thus, our goal with this essay is to provide a warning not just about the present but about the future.

Moscow will learn from this war, as will Beijing. Washington needs to get ahead of them in grasping the gravity of this war, understanding the challenges preconceived notions pose to the U.S. understanding of its implications, and finally, to providing a path forward for its rigorous assessment to identify and correct deficiencies.

David Johnson is a retired Army colonel. He is a principal researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is the author of Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1917-1945 and Learning Large Lessons: The Evolving Roles of Ground Power and Air Power in the Post-Cold War Era. From 2012-2014 he founded and directed the Chief of Staff of the Army Strategic Studies Group for General Raymond T. Odierno.

Zach Alessi-Friedlander is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, having served in tactical, operational, and strategic assignments in light infantry and armored cavalry units. He was a member of General Odiernos inaugural Strategic Studies Group and participated in the Art of War Scholars program at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He is currently a Ph.D. student in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Image: ArmyInform

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An Alternative History of AirLand Battle, Part II - War on the Rocks