Lessons Learned

May 3rd, 2026

There was a really smart guy at the Naval War College when I went through there, Michael Handel, and he had an interesting theory on intelligence for a senior commander (or president), but an idea that really applies to any subordinate pushing information up the chain. His idea was that such an officer hasn’t done his job until the boss accepts his argument. To say, as some routinely do, “well, we told them,” is to admit negligence. 

Said differently, if you know the enemy attack tomorrow morning you had better convince the boss. 

With that in mind, here are some thoughts on where we find ourselves, using the War in Ukraine as a starting point.

First Lesson, I repeat my first lesson learned from Ukraine: having really rich friends is the very best thing in a war… Ukraine without the EU and the US would have been swallowed up before the end of 2022. Ukrainians provide the blood, but the weaponry they fought with, from Javelin missiles to artillery shells to Patriots to the money to make millions of FPV drones, that came from its neighbors to the west - the EU and the US.

The real lesson for the US in that regard is that war is ALWAYS expensive and we need to be much more focused on the size of our budgets, and while there is always some fat that can be trimmed in the Pentagon, we have been spending too little on our national security since 1992. There are many members of Congress who should take a hard look in the mirror and then get back to their primary responsibility: passing a yearly budget that accurately reflects our national security needs.

And the War Department needs to take a hard look at casualties in Ukraine - the real numbers, not the ones in the papers. A fight with a peer would be Very bloody. So, improve our deterrence. Then, figure out how we might deal with huge casualties.

Second Lesson, a sort of restatement of the first: we need to take a very serious look at what our ammunition stockpiles should look like, and then fix it. Congress and the Contractors: Fix this.

Third Lesson, drones. Yes, everyone says drones, but we need to do some aggressive thinking. What do advancements in electronic warfare, energy weapons (lasers and micro-wave), passive defenses and all the rest really say about where drones, or any flying machine, will be over a future battlefield? Ukraine currently claims to defeat 90% of all long-range drones, on average - 10% survive. The Russians (who are a bit more sparse on their reporting) claim similar numbers. That number has been slowly but steadily climbing during the course of the war (since they started launching the Shahed and Shahed derivatives). And both sides have been very effective in defeating smaller drones, in excess of 50% of all the FPV drones currently, though that number has cycled up and down. An unconfirmed report from last year, as Russian forces apparently brought forward new EW gear, suggested that the Russians, at least for a time, were able to jam on the order of 95% of FPV drones. We could be facing a future battlefield where perhaps only 1% survive, not 10%.

Fourth Lesson, all eggs, one basket - bad idea. There has been, as just noted, an exponential rise in drone usage over the course of the war. And now Ukrainian sources are suggesting that 10 million drones per year will allow them to win the war.

Or not. Drones sound great but is this the be all and end all? Not likely.

And what if the Russians (with China’s help) can produce 15 million drones per year? What if Russian EW continues to improve? What if other Russian counter drone defenses improve? Where would that leave Ukraine? And where would it leave the US? Be assured that China is vacuuming up every piece of data they can from this war - to include exploiting any and every US weapon or piece of gear the Russians capture.

But, Fifth Lesson: why are we learning (re-learning) these lessons? None of this is really new. I have sat with friends - Navy and Marine officers - and we can all point to arguments made - usually by captains and colonels - over the course of the last 35 years, that identified every single problem that now confronts the Army, Navy, Marines, the Air Force, and the Space Force even though they weren’t a separate service then. And, we all knew where the next threats were. 

Did we have large enough ammo stockpiles? No. We saw the use rates in Desert Storm and knew that was the tip of the iceberg. 

We watched the Army and Marines fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Somalia and elsewhere, and we all understood that drawing lessons from those fights was like Mike Tyson trying to draw lessons from a fight film of him beating up a 12 year old Boy Scout.

Did we have enough ships and subs? No. We watched ships get retired, watched the fleets shrink, and the aircraft numbers decline, and the aircraft get older (the average USAF aircraft is older today than it ever has been), and we all saw it. There were multiple ways to address these issues. We all argued with our bosses. Eventually, we were all told to go away. As for the solutions to the problems; most of them were never tried.

“New” threats emerged - that weren’t new. Anyone who cared to look - and we did - saw the vacuum developing in the South China Sea in 1992 and it was obvious that China would fill it and in the end we would have a problem with China.

We saw drones coming and said “we need more drones.”

And on and on and on.

What happened?

What happened is simple but painful: we had the wrong leadership, the professional leadership, the leadership in uniform. We have had the wrong leadership for 35 years. 

I suppose it’s possible that if admirals and generals had gone to the White House, and gone to Capital Hill, and explained what the real threats were, had sat down and gone over in detail what the real threats were going to be, had discussed what we as a nation  needed to do to be ready to defend itself, to deter wars, to prevent catastrophes, had argued and explained and pounded on desks, that Congress would still have said “we don't care.” I suppose it’s possible that Congress and the Presidents were so completely derelict in their duties that clear, cogent explanations would have been ignored. 

If that is the case, we’re doomed.

But I don’t think so. I think Congress is full of a lot of politicians being politicians, but 95% of them are smart enough that IF the Pentagon, and IF the Intelligence Community, had taken the time to explain, and explain, and explain, and, as Professor Handel had said, gained acceptance, even at one Congressman and one Senator at a time, we wouldn’t be in this mess. But they didn’t. And so Congress never really heard it.

What that really means is that 35 years of selection of the wrong admirals and generals lies at the very base of all of this mess. Sure, some good ones snuck through. But fewer and fewer. And now we have this mess. We have the KC-46; the KC-46 messed up boom. The F-35. The Zumwalt class. The Ford class. Shipbuilding writ large. Only 186 F-22s, and they are already getting old. Not enough drones. C-17 is getting old. Readiness figures for nearly everything are too low. And on and on and on.

At its very base, this is a leadership problem, this is an admiral and general problem. The selection boards are picking the wrong guys. Secretary Hegseth has started. But there needs to be a very aggressive look at all the precepts, the guidance, to the selection boards. We need a new breed of admirals and generals, not ones who want to run the services like a business, not ones more concerned with process than results, not ones who take great pains to measure inputs but ignore outcomes. Rather, ones who are more like an old breed, guys who might survive scrutiny from a General Marshal or an Admiral Nimitz. And we need them now.