We are 120 weeks into the war in Ukraine, a peace conference begins in a week in Switzerland (at which only one side is represented), and the war continues to evolve.

Memorial Day is the day we stop and think about the 1,355,000 Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, and Coast Guardsmen who have died while in service to the nation. But, one of the things about Memorial Day that always bothers me is that, while the Soldiers and Sailors and Airmen and Marines who died in the major wars are remembered (though even then the focus is on the major battles, not the lesser known ones), the casualties in lesser wars and skirmishes are mostly forgotten and the Sailor or Marine who dies in some skirmish outside of a war is nearly completely forgotten. 

Much of the modern way of war springs from the writings of 4 men from the 1920s: Gen. Giulio Douhet, LtGen. Walther Wever, Marshal Hugh Montague “Boom” Trenchard, and of course, Col. Billy Mitchell.All were believers in “strategic bombing,” the idea that bombing the right targets would destroy morale while also destroying industrial capacity and disabling lines of communication, and drive any nation to surrender.Over the years the theory, particularly in the west, has undergone some modifications

On January 25th, 1942, USS Sargo (SS-186 (under the command of LtCmdr Tyrell Jacobs)) pulled into Surabaya, Indonesia after finishing a short war patrol, offloaded her remaining torpedoes, loaded 1 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, and headed to Mindanao, the Philippines to provide some ammunition to the US and the Philippine Armies. She then picked up 24 maintenance specialists from the B-17 wing and evacuated them from the Philippines. Jacobs, after three patrols in which he fired a great many torpedoes but sank no ships, turned over command, and ended the war working on, and significantly improving, US torpedoes.

In the news this week, Alexei Navalny, the dissident Russian politician who was serving 30 years in an Arctic Gulag, died. Navalny was a longtime rival of Tsar Vlad, had campaigned against corruption - Putin’s corruption - and after returning to Russia in 2021, had been found guilty of “extremism” and “fraud” - what were clearly nonsense charges, and sentenced to 30 years in prison. 

There has been some interesting talk in the past week about deterrence and escalation and proportionality and I’m beginning to wonder if those words still mean what I thought they mean, like the word “secret” on the front page of a newspaper. But it’s important to review what they really mean because getting this wrong can have significant consequences.

We created a Constitution - a remarkable feat, a document that was the envy of the world for 220 years - and still is if you want the root explanation of why millions of people are trying to get into the US and not so much anywhere else. (How many people tried to sneak into China last year?) 

One of the questions that keeps popping up in editorials, at least in the last month or two, is whether or not the folks in the White House want Ukraine to win the war with Russia. There are, of course, two obvious answers to that question - yes and no. But I have an unpleasant sense that the correct answer is “maybe.”

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