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Last year, Joseph Caddell wrote “From Waterloo to Pearl Harbor: How We Understand National Security Events‘” for War on the Rocks, in which he reviewed Takuma Melber’s book, Pearl Harbor: Japan’s Attack and America’s Entry into World War II , and considered how understanding of major national security events, like Pearl Harbor, change over time. A year and a half into the Russo-Ukrainian war and a month after the outbreak of the war in Gaza, we asked him to look back on his piece. Read more below.Image via the U.S. National Archives and Records AdministrationIn your piece, you start out by saying that “it will be a long, long time before national security scholars can hope to derive enduring lessons about the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War.” In the year since you published your piece, have any enduring lessons begun to emerge (especially as the Ukrainian campaign has begun to falter)? How are these different from the initial lessons taught by the conflict?Not to be glib from the outset … but it simply hasn’t been a long, long time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It’s not been nearly long enough for the type of enduring national security lessons I alluded to in my piece. The fundamental lessons the war’s start might offer future political leaders, military commanders, or intelligence professionals may not emerge for years, in no small part because the larger outcome of this war remains entirely uncertain. This is not to say there aren’t initial conclusions scholars and practitioners might reasonably draw from the start of the war and its 21-month conduct so far; indeed, speaking for myself, I enthusiastically follow and endorse much of the analysis found on this fine website. But the outcome of this war and its associated lessons are, to borrow a popular phrase, highly contingent. So,