“I often see it abstracted in conversations, a sense that the United States is number one, and China's number two, and Russia's maybe number three or four or five, wherever you want to put it. But there's no such thing. Military power requires a context to express itself, right? … It actually really matters what the scenario is because the geography matters, the political objectives matter.”

…fighting battles, then you don't have a campaign. Okay, you have maybe good ways of fighting a war, but you haven't thought through how you're going to win it. You don't have a campaign thought through. It's not obvious how the battles you're fighting are going to aggregate to military success.

…failures and what were the effective decisions on the Russian side and the Ukrainian side in the early days and the early months of the war. Maybe, Mike, you could also talk about what you predicted and what turned out to be a correct prediction and what turned out to be not a correct prediction.

What surprised you the most?

What surprised me the most, first, how the Russians actually conceived of this operation, the fact that they had fairly leveraged and fairly brittle force without any real plan B. There's no hedge in their invasion plan. Second, how poorly they performed at the tactical level, just in terms of…

Yeah, and I guess there's a bunch of things when you're speaking to the reality of war just went wrong. Like there's the columns of tanks going towards Kiev that weren't affected. When you take a military force and it connects with the reality of the geography, the situation, then you actually get…