The biggest surprise in the latest major intelligence-leak case is the purported motive: The suspected leaker provided highly sensitive U.S. intelligence assessments, mostly about the war in Ukraine, to an online chat group in order to show off.

That would be funny if the consequences weren’t so serious. The information revealed could compromise the crucial flow of information about Russian decision making and has certainly harmed the prospects for Ukraine’s anticipated spring military offensive. Repairing the damage will require costly and time-consuming efforts to acquire information in new ways, as previous targets—having now been given clues about how the U.S. was collecting intelligence—change their communications and patterns to shield themselves from scrutiny. The leak has surely constricted information sharing, at least within the U.S. government, and perhaps also among allies. All of that harm occurred, news reports suggest, so someone could feel important in front of 20 to 30 people on the internet.

[Juliette Kayyem: I oversaw the Massachusetts Air National Guard. I cannot fathom how this happened.]

Unfortunately, preventing future leaks of a similar nature will be a challenge because the alleged motive is difficult for investigators to deal with. Stealing secrets for money creates lifestyle changes that become evident, which is how the CIA’s Aldrich Ames was found out. Identifying people whose ideology drives them to spread classified information is harder, but their attitudes tend to manifest in social and professional circumstances. But how can intelligence agencies sniff out the kind of emotional insecurity that friends of the suspect, Jack Teixeira, are attributing to him? How can experts determine which of the people with access to high-level intelligence also crave the affirmation that recklessly damaging the nation’s security may provide?

Past leaks of U.S. intelligence have pointed out a variety of problems with the way American military and intelligence agencies handle information. For example, the widespread practice of overclassifying information desensitizes people to the need to keep certain things secret. For the sake of ease, speed, or privacy, people with security clearances use classified email systems to communicate even when the text they’re sharing contains no real secrets. People classify documents in draft form to prevent disclosure of policy information, even if the ultimate policy will be a matter of public knowledge. And staff at government agencies often bump up the classification level of information because they fear the penalties of wrongly under-classifying it. When everything is classified, some people might have trouble identifying when information is genuinely sensitive.

But that dynamic does not apply to what’s in the recently discovered leak. It contained a lot of signals intelligence, which is generally among the U.S. government’s most highly classified information because the means by which it is collected and the identities of the people being eavesdropped upon are evident in many cases. Assessments of the war in Ukraine are incredibly sensitive and clearly marked. Anything originating in the CIA Operations Center or prepared for the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is by definition noteworthy, even among classified documents.

The leaker surely knew that making the documents in question public was a massive breach of duty. As the Pentagon’s spokesperson, Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, said yesterday, “It’s important to understand that we do have stringent guidelines in place. This was a deliberate criminal act.”

Although many observers have noted the suspect’s young age and junior position in the military, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. The American military, generally to its credit, gives enormous responsibility to young men and women; the average age on the flight deck of some aircraft carriers is 19. And the sources of all three of the major intelligence breaches in the past 15 years have been junior staffers: the Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010, the defense contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, and the Air Force veteran and defense contractor Reality Winner in 2017. The intelligence profession is most vulnerable at its base, not its apex.

[Amy Zegart: Everything about the Ukraine leak  is incredibly weird]

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced in a statement that the Pentagon is reviewing “intelligence access, accountability and control procedures within the Department to inform our efforts to prevent this kind of incident from happening again.” My guess is that this will do little to reduce the risk. The alleged leaker probably had justifiable access to the information, and supervision is difficult online, as every parent knows. Supervision is especially tough in an operational military unit, where both the level of trust and the tempo of work tend to be high.

In the book Divided Armies, the political scientist Jason Lyall demonstrates that inclusivity—fostering a sense of respect and belonging—is a crucial determinant of war-winning armies. That feeling is harder to create and sustain in Guard and Reserve units, which are together only intermittently. It’s also harder to create and sustain when a former president and members of Congress are castigating the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a traitor and baiting officers with charges that “wokeness” is destroying the fighting power of our military.

When cynicism reigns, motives as seemingly empty as the thirst for online credibility might seem like sufficient reasons to give away national secrets. Simply tightening access to intelligence—or putting everyone with access under closer surveillance—could backfire. What would be the damage to fundamental political rights of policing the social lives and social media of everyone in military service? And what would be the effects on recruiting and retention if that intrusiveness were required? The best protection against destructive intelligence leaks is a spirit of shared purpose and a common recognition that, when lives are at stake, secrets should be kept.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What is your favorite cuisine? Be an unabashed partisan and make a case for why it’s the best in the world.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

Reflecting on last week’s unusually tumultuous news cycle, James Fallows makes the case for less political reporting at Breaking the News:

Reporting on politics has somehow become the prestige pinnacle of newspaper and broadcast journalism. Its practitioners are on TV panels and the book circuit.

I’ve long argued that Americans would be better informed, and simply more interested in the news, and reporters would feel more energized, engaged, and useful, if 90% of today’s political press corps were re-deployed on other beats. And if 90% of the airtime and online emphasis were given to other topics.

Partly that’s because other topics offer so much more depth and variety. The world is two-dimensional when it comes to presidential politics. The incumbent is doing well, or poorly. The next election will go this way, or it will go like that. Of course this matters, tremendously. But it’s binary. By comparison, stories on other topics—science, business, art, a community’s past and future, interests and achievements, practically anything —are as rich, surprising, and varied as life itself. When you read the presidential-politics stories or sit through the electoral-forecast panels, the world is unsurprising and gray. When you read or learn about anything else, it’s in full color and 3-D.

Building a Better Coronavirus Vaccine

The Biden administration is spending $5 billion on a program aimed at hastening the development of new coronavirus vaccines. Eric Topol argues that this is a wise investment.

Among his reasons:

The prospects for another Omicron-like event—a new family of variants that will challenge the immunity we have built up via vaccines, boosters, infections and their combinations. As I’ve previously reviewed, the chance of us seeing another highly troublesome variant is estimated to be 10-20% over the next 2 years, and higher as we go beyond that timeline. There are too many paths for this to happen, as shown below, for us not to worry about it. To anticipate this we need a pan-coronavirus vaccine that exploits our knowledge of not just the Spike protein, but also conserved regions of the virus, and a wealth of academic lab studies that have discovered critical antigenic sites (epitopes) of the virus for highly potent, broad, neutralizing antibodies which can serve as templates for such a variant-proof vaccine. We don’t need to “dream” about such a vaccine anymore. (This excellent review was published in Science, April 2021).

With all the science that’s been done, it ought to be attainable! The NextGen program will help accelerate that by promoting and de-risking the vaccine development programs. There are undesirable side effects, some lack of durability of protection beyond 4-6 months, and vaccine-induced injury for current Covid vaccines that can certainly be improved upon.

The Real Reason for Military-Recruiting Shortfalls?

In 2022, the Department of Defense implemented a new online platform called Military Health System Genesis to track the medical records of applicants before they could sign up for service. As a result, recruits have been prevented from fudging their own medical history to avoid being disqualified—which, Irene Loewenson and Geoff Ziezulewicz assert in Military Times, had been a common (if technically illegal) practice among many who wished to enlist in the pre-Genesis era. This newly accurate screening system is now fueling a military-recruitment crisis, Loewenson and Ziezulewicz write:

Political leaders and partisan pundits blame today’s recruiting crisis on everything from so-called “woke” diversity training to kids these days being too fat and lazy to cut it. Military brass have blamed an under-educated public, a roaring civilian jobs market and bad perceptions of service fueled by negative headlines. But multiple recruiters who spoke with Military Times blame Genesis above all else.

“When Genesis hit the scene, it was a night-and-day difference,” Navy recruiter Peter Harris, a petty officer, noted. Once an applicant signs their consent, Genesis vacuums up the entirety of their medical history, flagging past and present health issues.

That makes it harder, some recruiters say, to squeeze applicants through despite past maladies they did not disclose—such as ADHD, depression or a years-old broken bone. Recruiting numbers suffer as a result. Previously, such applicants could enlist if they concealed, or genuinely had forgotten about, these issues.

Reader Emails on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Robin argues that Stanford Law School Dean Jenny S. Martinez should be applauded for a recent letter sketching a version of DEI that coexists with freedom of speech rather than constraining it:

I believe Dean Martinez reinvigorated the DEI movement with its humane and perhaps original intent, which is to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, concepts that practically all of us will champion. In the university context, she pointed out that a basic aim is to provide an atmosphere “most conductive to speculation, experiment and creation,” and that promotes “the widest range of viewpoints … free of institutional orthodoxy ...” She called this part of “basic norms of pluralism,” which I think would be an appropriate way to summarize the goals of diversity, equity and inclusion. The extreme form of DEI is, instead, a moral effort to impose a way of thought, with pre-approved means and outcomes, which does not lead to a useful exchange of ideas that is essential to a thriving social network. We must welcome all comers; disagree vigorously when we don’t see eye to eye; stop, overcome, reverse past discrimination against groups among us; in order to live together for everyone’s benefit.

Paul describes a nonprofit group that he co-founded:

We started PROPEL Pequannock (Pequannock Residents of Pride, Equity, and Leadership) in an effort to make our [82 percent] white, very conservative Morris County, NJ, town more welcoming to all. Our families had experienced bias in the community, and soon we had members of the LGBTQ , Asian, and Black communities authoring their own first-person stories of bias that they had experienced in Pequannock, which we published on our website. We’ve succeeded in many firsts including June Pride Month Proclamations in 2021 and 22 as well as the 1st Annual Pequannock Pride Fest held at a public park last June. We had 30 vendors, music all day long, five food trucks, three children’s entertainment venues, and about 1,000 attendees all enjoying a beautiful day of kindness.

Meanwhile our local school board has been challenged by far-right candidates who combine DEI, socialism, CRT, and LGBTQ-themed books into a conspiratorial soup of what they deem pornography intended to “groom” their children. We’ve managed to defeat them in the last two elections, but this year Moms for Liberty endorsed one such candidate and we fear their money along with their well organized disinformation campaigns will be increasingly challenging.

So, in many ways it doesn’t matter to our PROPEL efforts what DEI, or CRT, or socialism means to people. Educating Americans these days seems a useless exercise in frustration. Instead we’ve settled on the simple notion of kindness as a way to achieve inclusive equity. This year we will award a scholarship to a graduating senior who demonstrated kindness throughout their high school career, and another to the student who most supported our mission. This year’s Pride Fest is sponsored by a regional hospital and a major corporate bank, so we’re establishing a solid foothold in the community. Whether kindness will prevail remains to be seen, but we’re hopeful.

And Mike questions efforts to supplant equality with equity:

If DEI refers to diversity, equity, and inclusion it is worth noting that one of these terms seems somewhat out of place. Diversity as a goal seems laudable: there is value in promoting diversity in academia and workplaces where it leads to better problem solving and outcomes. While some quibble over what forms of diverse individuals should or should not be included (one rarely sees attempts to include poor white people despite their exclusion from many important civic arenas), the basic thinking appeals to most.

Inclusivity, or the notion that it is worthwhile to work to make all people feel welcome, is an extension of basic manners. Asking a little extra of a workplace to accommodate people who have been underrepresented or ignored in order so they feel as though they belong is a natural next step of diversity efforts; there is little point to inviting different types of people somewhere only to treat them as if they shouldn’t have been invited.

But the last term, equity, seems the most fraught. Here’s one definition I found: “Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.” Equality is a common value in America. The idea that people should be afforded the same opportunity and then do the most with it, even if reality hasn't always lived up to that ideal, feels familiar. But everyone achieving the same outcome does not, and seems antithetical to equality. Different people have different abilities, interests, and work ethics.  

Why would anyone expect them to achieve identical outcomes? More to the point, who decides what is the ideal outcome? Who decides who will and will not receive those resources and opportunities? How will they allocate them? What happens if they aren’t allocated according to the dicta of the decider? Who decides who the decider will be? Diversity and inclusivity are about respect for the individual and bringing them into a common goal. What they do once they’re part of that group is up to them. Equity, at least how it is often promoted, seems to be more about paternalistically deciding goals for people, and picking winners and losers. One of these three is not like the other.

On the Death of a Mother

In an obituary for Joan Farrell McArdle, her daughter writes:

Nothing prepares you to lose your mother because, for you, there has never been a world without her in it. You floated through your days unaware that you were sustained by knowing she would be there to return to, in triumph or disaster. All you can do after is find things to fill the void, ideally things that remind you of her.

At War on the Rocks, Paul Scharre argues that the militaries that will best harness AI’s advantages “will be those that effectively understand and employ its unique and often alien forms of cognition.”

He explains:

When an AI fighter pilot beat an experienced human pilot 15-0 in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s AlphaDogfight competition, it didn’t just fly better than the human. It fought differently. Heron Systems’ AI agent used forward-quarter gunshots, when the two aircraft were racing toward each other head-to-head, a shot that’s banned in pilot training because of the risk of a collision. One fighter pilot characterized the AI’s abilities as a “superhuman capability” making high-precision, split-second shots that were “almost impossible” for humans. Even more impressive, the AI system wasn’t programmed to fight this way. It learned this tactic all on its own. AI systems’ ability to perform not just better than humans, but to fight differently, is a major potential advantage in warfare … U.S. defense projects sometimes conceive of AI systems as operating like a teammate or copilot. Yet AI systems often think in a radically different way to humans. These differences can be an advantage, but only if warfighters understand AI’s unique inhuman strengths and weaknesses.

The U.S. military should increase its investments in prototyping, experimentation, and wargaming with AI systems to better understand their potential in warfare and how to best employ them.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says all measures will be taken to find culprit who compromised American intelligence.

“For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch,” John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, said on Thursday at the White House, following the publication of the Biden administration’s report on the Afghanistan withdrawal. That statement made me angry. My perch was a lot lower than his, and I certainly saw chaos.

I had a modest part in the evacuation that was precipitated by the U.S. announcement in July 2021 that it was pulling out all troops by the end of August. At the time, I was working in London for a member of Parliament who had a role liaising between other MPs and the ministerial team at the Home Office. Once the Afghan capital, Kabul, fell to Taliban forces, on August 15, and the evacuation became urgent, those MPs came to our office for help with their constituent cases involving family or friends in Afghanistan. We did what we could to put those cases before the right people in the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Ministry of Defense. Many Afghans who had worked with the Afghan government or NATO forces now feared retribution from the advancing Taliban.

The job was all-consuming for days. Thousands of people in Kabul needed help to evacuate and didn’t know where to turn. Should they go to the airport? To the Baron Hotel, where the British consular team was then based? To the Americans? Should they cross the border into Pakistan? Did they have the right documents? Was their case in our system? Did we know about the crowds, the danger, the fear?

[George Packer: Escape from Afghanistan]

I worked flat out, refusing to let myself stop, refusing to let myself be overwhelmed. I sent emails, submitted cases, made calls. I checked off every name, read every story. I made sure I looked properly at every face I saw in the photos sent from Kabul—the photos from the mother who had found the body of her son dumped on her doorstep by the Taliban, from the wife who had found her husband’s shoe in the debris of their living room after he was abducted, from the young man who had been threatened because he had worked for the Western occupiers.

Like everyone else, I was also watching the rolling news reports from Kabul. We all saw that chaos. Crowds of desperate people outside the airport. Parents passing their children over fences. People falling from the wings of planes. Bodies in the streets. And, most horrifying, the suicide-bomb attack on Abbey Gate, which killed 13 American service members, two British nationals, and more than 170 Afghan civilians, and injured hundreds more.

My experience pales in comparison to those who were on the ground in Kabul trying to deal with these circumstances. I greatly admire the military and consular personnel, who did their absolute best with what they had. They saved thousands of lives with no thought for their own safety. The U.S. airlift got more than 122,000 people out, the British airlift 15,000 more. Each of those lives saved is a testament to the courage and the dedication of those diplomats, soldiers, and aircrews.

To say they were doing all of this amid chaos is no detriment to them; in fact, the disservice is not to acknowledge it. The processes and systems set up to facilitate the evacuation were simply not designed to withstand the level of turmoil that occurred after the fall of Kabul. We thought we would have more time. We were meant to have more time. But we didn’t.

[Read: Talking to the Taliban]

Apportioning blame for this is a difficult task. The Trump administration made a deal with the Taliban for the U.S. withdrawal that excluded the Afghan government, and then, by all accounts, did no planning whatsoever for how that would work. The Biden administration inherited that mess, and did what it could, but it repeatedly failed to see that Kabul was not going to hold long enough to ensure a secure and orderly withdrawal. The British government has had its own reckoning over failures in its processes, but ultimately had to work to the American timetable.

It is easy for armchair generals to pontificate on what they would have done differently—I know I have been guilty of that at times. We should welcome the Biden administration’s recognition that lessons need to be learned for the future. But to willfully ignore the chaos of the Kabul evacuation is to rewrite history. We cannot assess what went wrong by disregarding the experiences of those who were involved. That includes the Afghan civilians crowded outside the airport, the military and consular staff stationed there, and even the bureaucrats like me—safe in their nondescript offices abroad, but witnesses all the same. Those experiences are wildly different, but they share a common thread. They were all touched by chaos.

So my message to John Kirby is this: If you didn’t see chaos during the Kabul evacuation, where the hell were you looking?

The Defense Department is urgently working with lawmakers in hopes of resolving a hold on critical military nominations, including for some of the most senior ranking officers, as concerns inside the Pentagon grow about the potential impact on national security, defense officials told CNN.