An old truism says that logistics wins wars—a recognition that outcomes on the battlefield are a result of the systems that underpin the military. Similarly, the still-mushrooming fiasco of Jack Teixeira’s disclosure of national secrets is not just about a single service member or incident, but a cascading failure of systems within the armed services.

Teixeira, who was arrested in April, is accused of using his position in the Massachusetts Air National Guard to share top-secret intelligence with friends in the social-media forum Discord over the course of months—including sensitive information about the war in Ukraine and discussions with other governments.

[Kori Schake: A trivial motive for a dangerous leak]

Prosecutors’ filings as well as reporting on the case have slowly revealed the many moments when disaster could have been prevented. Given his behavior in high school, Teixeira should probably never have been able to enlist in the Air National Guard, and after he joined, he shouldn’t have been given security clearance. Once in the service, his theft of classified material should have been punished and stopped much sooner. More broadly, the circumstances that provided a 21-year-old guardsman with access to such sensitive information reflected a sloppy repurposing of Air National Guard units. The failure to detect his disclosures sooner was an intelligence problem. And Teixeira’s presence is emblematic of the broader problem of dealing with extremism within the ranks.

Teixeira was a troubled high-school student. In March 2018, he was suspended from school after “a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” according to federal prosecutors. That led local police to deny him a gun license when he applied for one. When Teixeira sought to join the military, investigators were aware of the incident but allowed him to enlist. Then he was allowed to obtain top-secret clearance as part of his job. In short, his town police had higher standards than people charged with safeguarding national security.

Perhaps a young person’s juvenile mistakes shouldn’t be held against them, but the military excludes recruits who have smoked too much marijuana, which is legal in half the country, and denies clearance to people who owe too much on credit-card bills. (In an impressive display of chutzpah, Teixeira later used his enlistment and clearance to appeal the gun-license denial—and successfully got it overturned.)

Once he had his clearance, Teixeira began exfiltrating classified material. In at least three instances, superiors raised questions, but he doesn’t appear to have been punished or had his clearance revoked. Prosecutors say he was caught taking notes on intelligence in September and chastised. The following month, superiors observed that he asked disconcertingly detailed questions, unrelated to his job, during a meeting. In February, he was again caught viewing intelligence not related to his work. Throughout all of this, Teixeira was sharing sensitive information online, apparently not hesitating even when scolded.

“A guy like Teixeira gets a pass because … his most objectionable stuff, he was doing … in relatively protected and private spaces,” Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran who now tracks extremism and disinformation, told me. “It’s not like his commander knows what Discord is.” But Goldsmith said the answer isn’t officers snooping into every Guard member’s social-media presence: “We don’t want to live in a country where everything we do on the internet needs to be monitored.” Rather, better screening was needed when Teixeira enlisted and applied for clearance.

[Tom Nichols: The narcissists who endanger America]

Extremism among members of the military and veterans is a serious and difficult problem—as the many active-duty and former service members charged with crimes in the January 6 insurrection illustrated. This is not to say extremism is particularly rampant in the armed services. A RAND report last week found that support for white supremacism is lower in the military than in the general population, as is belief in QAnon. Support for political violence and belief in the “Great Replacement” theory are similarly prevalent within the military as in the rest of the country. But service members’ tactical discipline and their access to national-security assets make them more dangerous than the average citizen with off-the-deep-end beliefs. Early on, the Biden administration announced a push to fight extremism in the military, but CNN recently reported that Republican criticisms of the effort’s “wokeness” scuttled its efficacy.

In Teixeira’s case, it seems possible that his mien—white, clean-cut, self-styled as a patriot and gun lover—might have allowed him to escape earlier scrutiny, even though many men of his age and interests are inclined to extremism. “It’s pretty easy to keep your head down and not get into trouble, especially if you’re in the reserves or the Guard,” Goldsmith told me. “A guy like Teixeira doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to get in trouble.”

One might ask why a low-ranking, 21-year-old Air National Guard member had access to sensitive intelligence in the first place. One answer would seem to be the Defense Department searching for ways to deal with obsolete units. In 2005, 14 Air National Guard units, including Teixeira’s, quit flying airplanes as part of a reorganization. With the military relying more heavily on drones, the unit was reassigned to handle computers and intelligence from the unmanned aircraft.

My colleague Juliette Kayyem, who for a time oversaw the Massachusetts Air National Guard, wrote in April about how ridiculous it is that someone of Teixeira’s rank was able to see what he was seeing. As The New York Times explained recently, “Airmen like Mr. Teixeira typically fix hardware and software problems and conduct routine maintenance for hours at a time in what is essentially an I.T. support shop while others collect intelligence that they can transmit to ground forces around the world.”

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

If it is true that Teixeira shouldn’t have been in the military or given clearance, and that his position shouldn’t have afforded him access to the material he disclosed, one more glaring question remains: How did it take so long to detect him? “The unauthorized disclosure points to broader systemic failures in the safeguarding of U.S. intelligence information,” Brianna Rosen wrote at Just Security last month, adding, “Why did it take at least a month for the unauthorized disclosure to come to the attention of U.S. authorities?”

Since then, evidence has emerged that Teixeira had been sharing classified information since February 2022. This means that something often described as the worst leak in a decade took more than a year to detect. Somehow a system that manages to violate civil liberties on a mass scale is also unable to ferret out real threats with any speed. Together, these problems add up to a system that seems broken from the narrowest level of recruiting airmen to the broadest one of safeguarding national secrets.

Two months before invading Ukraine, Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on its neighbor’s border and sent NATO a bill of demands. Moscow’s list—structured as a treaty—required that the alliance close itself off to new members. It declared that NATO states “shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine as well as other States” in Eastern Europe. It insisted that NATO remove all its forces from the 14 countries that joined after the Soviet Union collapsed. And it asserted that the alliance “shall not deploy land-based” missiles in areas “allowing them to reach the territory” of Russia.

Moscow suggested that the treaty was a pathway for lowering tensions with the West. Yet according to U.S. intelligence officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin had decided to invade Ukraine months earlier. In reality, the treaty was just a diplomatic pretext for the war: a laundry list of things that Putin hated about NATO, wanted changed, and would kill Ukrainians to protest.

But if Putin thought that invading Russia’s neighbor would get the West to accede to his demands, he was wildly mistaken. Rather than pulling troops from its east, NATO responded to Russia’s aggression by deploying more soldiers in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. The alliance did not close its doors; instead, it expanded, adding Finland this April, with Sweden possibly close behind. Ukraine is not part of NATO, but the invasion has pushed the United States and Europe to send remarkable amounts of military assistance to Kyiv, including rockets, tanks, and Soviet-era fighter jets. Most recently, Washington signaled that it will let Europe provide Ukraine with U.S.-made F-16s. The West has effectively flouted all of the draft treaty’s demands.

And yet there’s one line Washington hasn’t crossed. Despite repeated pleas, the United States has not given Kyiv land-based missiles capable of hitting Russia.

“We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters in September. He hasn’t budged since.

Brynn Tannehill: What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine

To many analysts, Biden’s decision—and implicit reasoning—is perceptive. Sustained Ukrainian attacks inside Russia’s territory could violate Putin’s red lines in a way that previous strikes haven’t. So could repeatedly hitting Crimea, the peninsula that the Kremlin illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014. “It’s Crimea and Russian territory,” Austin Carson, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago who studies escalation, told me. “I would worry about crossing one of those bedrock limits.”

But to Ukrainians, these concerns are detached from reality. Kyiv has made isolated attacks on Crimea and Russia before, none of which has widened the conflict. In fact, none of Moscow’s wartime escalations has touched NATO land. And the United Kingdom has already given Kyiv some missiles, fired from planes, that can reach into Russia. France may do so as well. Britain’s provision did not prompt the Kremlin to go berserk.

“People are quite confused,” the former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk told me when I asked what Ukrainians thought about Washington’s reticence. “They just don’t understand.”

They are also tremendously frustrated, because Kyiv may need long-range U.S. missiles to win the conflict. “It’s just impossible to be on the battlefield and continuing to fight with the weapons that Ukraine already has,” Polina Beliakova, a Ukrainian political scientist at Dartmouth College who studies civil-military relations, told me. Ukrainian soldiers, she said, are performing admirably. But without superior weapons, even the most motivated military will struggle to defeat a much larger enemy. To liberate more provinces, Ukrainians could have to strike hard, far, and again and again. Washington will have to decide just how much it is prepared to help them.

The United States Army Tactical Missile System is a formidable weapon. Developed in the late Cold War and first used in Operation Desert Storm, ATACMS are launched straight out of the back of vehicles that Washington has already given to Kyiv. (Washington, afraid of escalation, modified the vehicles it sent so that Ukraine couldn’t use them to fire long-range missiles.) Once airborne, the missiles can reach more than three times the speed of sound, making them very difficult to intercept. They can travel up to 186 miles.

These specifications give ATACMS—pronounced “attack-ems”—certain advantages over Britain’s missiles. The latter weapons, although very powerful in their own right, do not move as fast or go quite the same distance as ATACMS. They must be fired out of fighter jets, and Ukraine’s fleet is overtaxed. The radars on Ukrainian jets are also not as powerful as the ones on many Western aircraft, making it tricky for the crew to accurately target each missile. Britain’s provision will become more useful if Kyiv receives F-16s, but Ukrainians won’t be able to fly the U.S. jets for at least several months. And by then, Kyiv may not have many of the missiles left.

“There is no analogue for ATACMS,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “There is no alternative.”

Zagorodnyuk said that, if received, ATACMS could give Ukraine major advantages. For starters, the missiles would make it much easier for Kyiv to hit most of Russia’s command posts and wartime weapons depots, which typically lie beyond the front lines but within 186 miles. ATACMS would also help the Ukrainian military sever the so-called land bridge to Crimea: the thin strip of occupied territory that connects Russia with the peninsula’s isthmus. Similarly, the missiles could hit the bridge that directly links Crimea with Russia. Together, these attacks would substantially weaken Moscow’s forces in southern Ukraine, helping with Kyiv’s counteroffensive. They could even pave the way for Ukraine to take back the peninsula, which is widely considered Kyiv’s hardest military target.

For Ukrainians, taking Crimea may be essential to ending the war and protecting their country, especially given that the peninsula is now a giant staging ground for Russia’s forces. But for Washington, a campaign to take Crimea would be deeply unsettling. Putin views Crimea as perhaps his most prized asset. After Russia seized it in 2014, his approval ratings soared to record highs. The Biden administration has publicly said that Ukraine has the right to liberate all of its occupied territory, Crimea included, yet senior U.S. officials have repeatedly insinuated that going after the peninsula would be too dangerous. In February, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told experts that an operation for Crimea would be a “red line” for the Kremlin.

In theory, the United States could provide ATACMS on the condition that Ukraine not use them to hit the peninsula. But Kyiv is unlikely to accept such an arrangement. “That would set a massive precedent of treating Crimea as a special case, and that’s exactly what the Russians want,” Zagorodnyuk told me. Ukraine could even be tempted to use the missiles to strike Russia proper. According to The Washington Post, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky privately proposed attacking Russian villages in order to gain leverage over the Kremlin. And on Monday, pro-Ukrainian militias launched an assault across Russia’s border. They appear to have used U.S.-made vehicles in their incursion.

Publicly, Kyiv has assured Washington that it will not hit Russia with U.S. rockets. But no matter the conditions, guaranteeing that the missiles would not cross one of Moscow’s trip wires is impossible.

“The risk is that you think you’re okay and then you hit that red line and then things escalate really fast out of control,” Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. In the worst-case scenario, that spiral could lead to Russia using nuclear weapons. But Kavanagh pointed out that Moscow could escalate in many ways without going nuclear. It could, for instance, carpet-bomb Ukrainian cities. It could also launch cyberattacks on NATO states.

From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive

The odds of Russia attacking NATO, digitally or otherwise, might seem long. But they are not outlandish, especially considering Moscow’s perspective. “Russia doesn’t see itself fighting Ukraine,” Margarita Konaev, the deputy director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told me. “It sees itself fighting NATO.”

The Kremlin’s reasoning, she explained, makes some sense. Moscow is battling against NATO weapons systems. Its troops are being hit with NATO members’ ammunition. Ukraine is operating based off U.S. intelligence. “The only thing they’re not fighting are NATO troops on the ground,” Konaev said. If Ukraine begins regularly shelling Crimea or Russian territory with U.S.-made weapons, Russia could respond as if NATO was attacking the homeland.

Almost no one knows exactly how many soldiers Ukraine has lost fighting against Russia. But the number is large. According to the classified documents leaked on Discord last month, the U.S. government estimates that Ukraine has suffered somewhere from 124,500 to 131,000 casualties. The figure is lower than Russia’s estimated 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, but Ukraine’s population is about a third the size of its adversary’s. If the war turns into a pure battle of attrition, Kyiv will struggle to hold out.

It’s not surprising, then, that Ukrainians have little patience for Washington’s escalation concerns.

“Not providing better weapons would basically throw Ukraine under the bus in slow motion,” said Beliakova. She described the frustration of sitting through meetings where Western policy makers theorized about what a long war would look like, and how they can help sustain Kyiv. “They go, ‘Oh, well the West can easily supplement this, supplement that, provide this, provide that,’” Beliakova said. “I’m like, ‘Ukraine will run out of people!’” The country, she told me, needs more long-range weapons if it is going to overcome Russia’s enormous demographic advantage.

Some analysts went even further, wondering if Washington’s reluctance was designed to stop Ukraine from winning. “If you’ve noticed, the [Department of Defense], the White House, they never talk about victory,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “They’re still talking about an unknown ending to this story. And so the political goal of the Western coalition is unclear.”

Giving long-range missiles to Kyiv, he said, would help eliminate the ambiguity. Doing so would be a boost to Ukrainian morale—one that might be needed if the forthcoming counteroffensive does not succeed. Providing ATACMS would also signal to the rest of the Western alliance that the United States supports going to the max to help Kyiv, possibly easing hesitations in European capitals about supplying other Ukrainian needs.

Ukrainians do not think that Russia would escalate if the United States sent long-range missiles. “I don’t believe the escalation story,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “There have been tons of other weapons supplied for tens of billions of dollars. ATACMS is not going to make a big difference.” Even if it did prompt Russian anger, Ukrainians are unsure as to why NATO should care. Moscow has escalated in the past: it responded to Kyiv’s astonishingly successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv by mobilizing 300,000 new troops, and it began indiscriminately bombing Ukrainian cities after an explosion damaged the Crimean-Russian bridge. But these steps hurt Ukrainians, not NATO members. Unless Russia uses a nuclear weapon, breaking a nearly 78-year taboo and endangering the entire planet, the West is unlikely to directly enter the conflict because of Russia’s atrocities. And so long as they believe they can win, Ukrainians appear prepared to endure a whole lot.

The country’s hawks have grown pessimistic about getting the missiles. Yes, they said, Washington and its allies have changed their mind in the past. But with tanks and F-16s, Western claims were as much about technical concerns as they were about the security risks. These weapons, policy makers argued, would take too much time and energy for Ukrainians to receive and learn how to use. There are technical risks with ATACMS too: Many American experts worry about depleting the United States’ limited supply, or that Russia could capture a missile, copy its design, and send China a mock-up.

Still, such hurdles can be overcome. Ukraine’s battlefield performance, and its success in Western training programs, helped convince NATO states that the country could handle more sophisticated weapons. If Ukrainians use Britain’s long-range missiles successfully, and in ways the U.S. approves of, Kyiv could convince Washington that it should get ATACMS as well.

But not if Washington is too afraid of how Russia will respond.

“With ATACMS, I don’t see these coming,” Zagorodnyuk said. Then he paused. “Yet.”

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Republican lawmakers in several states have begun the process of rolling back tenure at their public institutions of higher education on the grounds that no one should have a lifetime job. And yet, many national conservatives seem determined to defend Justice Clarence Thomas on those very grounds.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The only career advice you’ll ever need Why so many conservatives feel like losers The most jarring—and revealing—moment from Trump’s CNN town hall Something weird is going on with Melatonin. Dancing Bears

Conservatives, in general, hate the idea of academic tenure. I say this not only as an impression after 35 years in academia (most of them while I was a Republican), but also because conservative officials are taking concrete action against tenure now in states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. (Republicans have engaged in similar attempts over the past several years in North Dakota, Tennessee, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and several other states.)

Decades ago, when conservatives were more consistent in their views, their position on tenure proceeded from their worship of markets. They argued that no other business would protect employees from the consequences of poor performance or even misconduct with an unbreakable contract. A coherent position, perhaps, but one rife with incorrect assumptions, as I’ll explain below.

Full disclosure: I have been denied tenure twice, and granted tenure twice. I’ve chaired a tenure committee, and been on both sides of the tenure process. Often, it’s not a pretty business, but it is essential to higher education.

With some variations between small colleges and big professional schools, the tenure process mostly looks like this: A new teacher with a Ph.D. holds the rank of assistant professor for three years, at which time they face a contract renewal for another three years. During that next contract, they will “come up for tenure,” an up-or-out decision, much like the cut the U.S. military makes after certain ranks, or when a professional firm makes decisions about partnerships.

The applicant submits a package of accumulated work, and his or her department will also ask senior faculty at other institutions to review the entire file and submit letters with their recommendations. (I have been asked to write such letters myself.) The entire package then gets a recommendation from the department and is sent up to a higher body, drawn from other departments and usually convened by an academic dean. A final recommendation is then sent to the school president. At any point in this process, the candidate’s application can fail.

There are multiple layers of review here, and sure, there are many opportunities for mischief. (A classic move, for example, is for committee members to solicit letters from reviewers they know will either support or torpedo a candidate’s application.) Candidates who succeed become an associate professor; the title of full “professor” comes years later and requires another complete review in most places. After tenure, faculty are insulated from firing for just about anything except gross misconduct or financial exigencies—say, if a department is eliminated or cut back.

But “misconduct” covers a lot of ground, and tenured faculty are far from unfireable. Falsifying research, engaging in sex with with students (at least, at those schools where such relationships are forbidden), nonperformance of duties (like not showing up for class), and criminal behavior can all count. My first tenure contract was with a Catholic school that had a “moral turpitude” clause, which as you could imagine can mean many things.

Tenured faculty, however, cannot be fired for having unorthodox or unpopular views, for being liberals or conservatives, for failing your kid no matter how smart you think Poopsie really is, or for being jerks in general. This is as it should be: Some opinions will always be controversial; some teaching styles rub people the wrong way; some classes are harder than others. There are, to be sure, cases where professors are so wildly offensive that they functionally destroy the classroom environment—but such cases are rare and should be adjudicated by the institution, not by the state.

The alternative to tenure is to keep faculty on short-term contracts and to abandon the important democratic principle of academic freedom. If faculty can be fired—or their contracts quietly “non-renewed”—for any reason, they will self-censor. If they think the students are unhappy, they will pander. If you want faculty who are confident, will say what they think, and will deal honestly with students, tenure is essential. If you want faculty who will become timid clock-punchers, then contracts are the way to go. The contract system eventually grinds down even the most well-intentioned academics, and, as I once warned one of my own institutions, it turns many of them into dancing bears for student and administration applause.

Dancing bears are exactly what today’s Republicans want. Some of the market-oriented GOP attacks on hidebound faculty many years ago had merit; during my career I saw colleges wrestle with that very problem. The current GOP assault on tenure, however, is about culture, not economics or even education. The GOP base doesn’t like that universities are full of liberals, and so Republican elected officials attack higher education for the rush of approval they’ll get, much of it from people who no longer have kids anywhere near college age. As FiveThirtyEight’s Monica Potts noted, there’s a reason that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed his tenure-review bill in a ceremony at The Villages, Florida’s noted retirement community.

Meanwhile, New York’s Representative Elise Stefanik proudly sponsored a legislative attack on academic freedom, charging that leftism “has pervaded” the State University of New York system and asserting that she was going to do something about it. Elise Stefanik, of course, went to Harvard. But like DeSantis (a graduate of Harvard and Yale), she was going to make sure that the commoners weren’t exposed to any dangerous ideas at the schools reserved for the proles, the rabble whose names are not Elise Stefanik or Ron DeSantis.

Nowhere, however, is the hatred of a guaranteed lifetime job more hypocritical than in the continued right-wing defenses of Justice Clarence Thomas.

The litany of Thomas’s ethical issues is far beyond anything that required poor Abe Fortas to step down from the Supreme Court in 1969. Thomas’s behavior cannot adequately be captured by so gentle a phrase as the appearance of impropriety, the standard set for other U.S. judges. But despite Thomas being utterly insulated from consequences, conservatives deny even that Thomas should face criticism. As Justice Samuel Alito whined recently: “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”

(Alito is plenty angry about criticism of the members of his own club, but he seems less concerned about attacks on other government employees—especially far less powerful people such as teachers, election officials, and civil servants. But I digress.)

What’s really going on, of course, is that Republicans have given up on persuading their fellow citizens to support them at the ballot box, and so they’ve decided to get what they want by using a tactic for which they once excoriated the left: appealing to judges who have lifetime appointments. Professors with secure jobs are a threat to the republic, apparently, but judges who can throw the country into turmoil with one poorly reasoned opinion must be defended at all costs.

I support lifetime tenure for federal judges and Supreme Court justices, not least because I do not want them to try to time their judgments against impending deadlines for retirement. But Republicans across the country who are railing against ostensibly unfireable elites on campuses might consider being a bit more consistent about one sitting in regal isolation on First Street in Washington, D.C.

Today’s News The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Google and Twitter in a victory for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social-media platforms from liability over content posted by users. An 8-year-old girl died in a detention facility in Texas, as the death toll at the southern border continues to rise. Disney canceled its construction plans for a roughly $1 billion office complex in Orlando. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf weighs in on the problem with state bans on gender care.

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Evening Read Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Ellen Graham / Getty; Harrington Collection / Getty.

How to Have a Realistic Conversation About Beauty With Your Kids

By Elise Hu

Talking to my three elementary-school-age daughters about beauty can be hard. No matter how much I insist that their looks don’t matter, that their character is what truly counts in life, they don’t believe me. About a year ago, I was tiptoeing down the hallway after tucking my 9- and 6-year-olds into their bunk bed when I overheard the younger one. “Momma says it doesn’t matter if you’re beautiful; it matters if you’re clever,” she said to her sister. The eldest replied, “She only says that because she’s already pretty.”

As I recount in my book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital, that moment stopped me cold. But my children were right to be skeptical of my advice. Study after study confirms that prettiness can be a privilege.

Read the full article.

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Read. Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which delves into the weird mindset of doomsday preppers.

Watch. HBO’s new limited series White House Plumbers explores the banal oafishness behind the Watergate scandal.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I wrote a few days ago about the infighting among Russian elites, who are all keen to blame one another for Russia’s miserable military performance. The Ukrainians are soon to launch a counteroffensive, and the reporter Anna Nemtsova wrote today that she’s never seen the Kremlin so rattled. And rightly so: Russian casualties are mind-boggling. By most estimates, in the battle for Bakhmut, 20,000 Russian men have been killed and 80,000 more wounded. One hundred thousand casualties in six months and mostly in the fight for one city is why both the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Wagner Group, the privately run army of mercenaries, are now populating their ranks with men dredged out of Russia’s prisons.

Life inside Russia’s prisons is a mystery to most Westerners, but it is actually a very structured hierarchy, based on rules and castes. I want to point readers toward this excellent explainer on Russian prison culture, and why that culture all but guarantees that the prisoners would be an almost ungovernable military force. The decision to use convicted criminals might seem, to Westerners, a sign of brutal resolve, but it was an extreme, even strategically insane move that has hurt Russian operations more than it helped—and produced few advances but plenty of Russian corpses.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

In 1969, the KGB pulled off one of the cleverest deceptions of the Cold War, slipping forged documents into a leak of otherwise authentic U.S. war plans in an effort to pit America against its NATO allies. More than 50 years later, I was invited to run a training session on disinformation for a U.S. intelligence agency. In my back-and-forth with the official in charge, I proposed a game of spot-the-fake using the 1969 leak. The exercise would test whether the intelligence officers could recognize one of the best forgeries in the history of spycraft. But the official shot down my idea. The leaked material technically may still be classified, he explained, so we weren’t allowed to use it. In fact, although the documents had been sitting in public view since before most of us were born, the officers in the class weren’t even allowed to look at them.

For this I had the Department of Defense to thank. On June 7, 2013, days after the Edward Snowden story broke, the Pentagon issued an immediate security guidance: Employees or contractors “who inadvertently discover potentially classified information in the public domain shall report its existence immediately to their Security Manager,” read the new rule. This reporting requirement was onerous enough on its own to scare federal employees. To make things worse, those who didn’t just stumble across classified documents but looked for them deliberately would be punished: Contractors or employees “who seek out classified information in the public domain, acknowledge its accuracy or existence, or proliferate the information in any way will be subject to sanctions,” stated the notice. (The directive was grounded in a similar 2010 rule issued by the Office of Management and Budget.) Given that the Snowden revelations were being published by media organizations and blasted around the internet, the policy effectively turned mundane activities like watching the news, browsing social media, searching Google, and even reading books into a risky proposition for any federal employee or contractor.  

Ten years later, the illogic of this policy has only grown clearer. In the pre-internet age, leaks of classified documents were rare. Today, thanks to the internet, they’re regular events. In the past dozen years, the United States has seen five mega-leaks, each with hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of documents spilled into the public domain. The names of the leaks are infamous in national-security circles: Cablegate in 2010, enabled by Chelsea Manning; the Snowden disclosures of 2013; the Shadow Brokers episode of 2016; the release of the Vault 7 files of 2017, stolen by Joshua Schulte; and, most recently, the Discord leaks, courtesy of Jack Teixeira.

These leaks can cause major geopolitical headaches. They can even get people killed. But, like the KGB leak of 1969, they also provide rich troves of material that advance expert understanding of how tradecraft is conducted—by both the U.S. and its adversaries. Snowden exposed how intelligence agencies adjusted their methods to the digital era, how signals-intelligence development evolved, and much more. The Shadow Brokers and Vault 7 exposed how implant platforms are designed and how the NSA does digital counterintelligence. The Discord leaks revealed invaluable knowledge on a range of geopolitical crises. It is simply impossible to understand the story of technical spycraft and computer-network penetrations in the 21st century—a discipline that first emerged in secret—without studying these unauthorized disclosures.

[Read: The limits of signals intelligence]

Yet the U.S. government has decreed this literature taboo for precisely the people who would most benefit from viewing it. Last month, on the heels of the Discord leaks, the deputy secretary of Defense reaffirmed the 10-year-old rule, warning that “failure to appropriately safeguard classified information”—even information that’s already public—“is a reportable security incident.”

The authors of this policy meant well, and some elements of the rule make sense. If a government official denies a certain element of a leak, for example, they are implicitly affirming the rest of it. More generally, the government wants to avoid the precedent that a bulk leaker could effectively become a rogue declassification authority. But trying to stop members of our own national-security establishment from even looking at leaked documents that are already being viewed by the public—not to mention by rival nations—tips into the absurd.

This became apparent in late 2016, in the wake of the Shadow Brokers disclosures. The hackers behind that leak, who still have not been identified, released not just documents that could be read but computer code that could be used. Suddenly, hostile actors around the world had access to NSA hacking tools that could be deployed against American commercial and government targets. Network defenders for the Department of Defense faced a dilemma. They needed to scan for incoming hacks—but they technically were not allowed to look at the hacking tools that were already being used by some of the most determined adversaries of the United States, including Russian military intelligence and North Korean cyberoperators. To do their job, they would have to violate the department’s official policy.

The issue of defending against forbidden code wasn’t limited to government employees. It extended to U.S. security companies that employ contractors with security clearances. These contractors are bound by the Department of Defense’s rule even when they’re not performing work for the government. I once asked a U.S. cybersecurity executive how his company handled the banned-documents problem in the context of securing the networks of their own clients. His answer: They would assign U.S. leaks to British analysts and leaked U.K. documents to American analysts.

As a professor of strategic studies and cybersecurity, I’m particularly concerned about the rule’s effect on students. Although the Pentagon guidance does not say so, most of my students at Johns Hopkins assume that reading leaked files will reduce their chances of getting a security clearance down the line. It’s what they pick up at happy hours, at receptions, and on social media from peers and alumni who work in the national-security establishment in and around Washington, D.C. The risk-averse culture in this town treats the leaks as forbidden fruit that should not be tasted. Yes, some of my students seriously believe that learning could harm their career prospects. Some therefore avert their eyes not just from primary-source documents but also from social-media feeds that might carry forbidden screenshots. Some go so far as to limit their news consumption and express concern about reading assigned books that use technically still-classified primary sources.

Even fellow scholars of intelligence history and cybersecurity sometimes avoid reading primary-source documents, for they see them as banned knowledge. They’re missing out. I have found that studying leaked files helps me better understand intelligence reports. Just this week, the Five Eyes alliance released an advisory attributing a sophisticated, stealthy implant known as “Snake” to Russia’s Federal Security Service. I trust that report more because I learned from the Snowden leaks how the NSA and its British counterpart built even stealthier implants and refined the means to detect such cyberespionage tools.  

[Read: Of course this is how the intelligence leak happened]

The Pentagon’s policy is even more unfortunate as applied to the Discord leaks, because the pool of people who could learn from them is much wider than with past document dumps. Teixeira disclosed finished intelligence reports, not raw slide decks or technical manuals or hacking tools. These reports, which include military assessments about the war in Ukraine and accounts of behind-the-scenes diplomatic maneuvering, are of interest to a broad range of expert readers, not just technical nerds like me. Some of my colleagues, for example, closely follow China and Taiwan, or North Korea’s missile ambitions, or Iran’s covert actions, or the war in Ukraine. They may still hold an active clearance but have no strict “need to know” and hence no access to current intelligence reporting. In the early days after the leaks, when documents were beginning to get passed around, I noticed one intelligence report about Vladimir Putin’s health. I shared a screenshot with a fellow professor at my school who closely follows the Ukraine war. I expected him to be excited to read it. Instead, his response was, “I’m not supposed to be looking at these things.” I quickly deleted the screenshot from our chat. Reporters face a version of this problem too: When they approach experts for insight or a quote, those experts often decline out of fear that they’ll get in trouble for looking at a document that the press already has its hands on.

The regular spillage of secrets brings a larger paradox into sharp relief: Even democratic governments have secrets that they must work hard to protect. Yet, once those secrets are out, open societies must work hard to understand and learn from the facts that now are no longer secret, whether they are still technically classified or not.

Studying the leaks is in the U.S.’s national interest. Attempting to prevent an educated conversation about details and capabilities that are already public isn’t just quixotic—it’s also wasting an opportunity. Once the horse has bolted, you might as well ride it. A secret that has been publicized is no longer a secret. The task for government therefore must shift from protecting the information to making sure that the right lessons are drawn from it. The most pressing task of the U.S. intelligence establishment in this still-young century has been, and will continue to be, to expose and attribute the espionage, subversion, and sabotage of authoritarian spies and their global proxies. Mega-leaks can frustrate those efforts—but they also give the world a glimpse at an impressive set of tools and capabilities. One of the biggest revelations in the era of the mega-leak, ironically, is that the NSA and CIA are generally quite creative and effective at what they do. That’s one fact the government should not want to cover up.

There are few ways of escape from the Taliban’s Afghanistan. One of them crosses the mountainous eastern border with Pakistan in a town called Torkham. Last September, Safia Noori; her husband, Fakhruddin Elham; and their four-month-old daughter, Victoria, traveled to Torkham and joined a throng of Afghans waiting to be allowed across by Taliban guards. The day was hot; the baby was crying; the crowd pressed in. Noori and Elham, in their early 20s, were carrying just two small bags, one with the baby’s clothes, the other with their own. They had sold everything else, including the furniture and handmade curtains and bedspread that made up Noori’s wedding dowry, to buy passports. They hadn’t seen their parents since the fall of Afghanistan a year before. As former special-forces soldiers who had fought alongside Americans, and as a mixed couple—he is Tajik, she Hazara, a persecuted Shia minority—they were prime targets for revenge killing by Afghanistan’s new rulers. They had spent the past year in flight from town to town, safe house to safe house. At times, Noori later told me, she’d considered suicide, even after she knew that she was pregnant. Only the baby’s birth gave her the strength to keep going.

Border guards searched their bags and examined their documents. “Why is a Hazara married to a Tajik?” a Talib demanded. “You should have married a Hazara, and you should have married a Tajik. Why did you crossbreed? Why does this family exist?”

“In our eyes, we don’t see black and white,” Noori replied. All that mattered was whether someone was a good human being. Noori’s answer didn’t please the guards. “Why are you leaving?” they asked. “Why aren’t you happy here in Afghanistan?”

Noori showed them hospital documents requiring medical treatment for her C-section. The baby’s name caught a guard’s eye.

“Why Victoria? Why didn’t you give her a proper Islamic name?”

Noori dodged the question. It would have been dangerous, maybe fatal, to tell the Talib that she had named her daughter after a United States Army reserve captain named Victoria Marshman. Marshman had served in Afghanistan, where she trained all-women Afghan special-forces units called Female Tactical Platoons, or FTPs, and joined them on dangerous combat missions with male Afghan and American commandos. Marshman became close to several members of the FTPs. In August 2021, just before the fall of the Afghan government, one of them, a female commando named Mahjabin, was murdered in Kabul. As the Taliban took over, Marshman, working with other American military women, and texting from her house in Honolulu, helped guide more than two dozen Afghan military women and their family members into the Kabul airport and out of Afghanistan, heading to the U.S. (In my account of those events in this magazine, she was given the pseudonym Alice Spence.) Scores more women were left behind, including 32 FTPs, all thoroughly vetted by the U.S. military.

Marshman never stopped trying to get them out. Through the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Slap, Dobbs v. Jackson, Queen Elizabeth, Elon Musk, Mahsa Amini, the midterm elections, Sam Bankman-Fried, ChatGPT, earthquakes, floods, fires, two Super Bowls, six Trump investigations, dozens of mass shootings, and the return of Biden versus Trump, Marshman, on her own time, has worked single-mindedly to keep her network of Afghans alive and bring them to safety. She gives priority to single women and mothers with young children, and her list keeps growing as other Afghans hear about her and send desperate WhatsApp texts. The list now includes 206 people—90 principals, mostly former military or police women, and 116 dependents.

“I have to triage all the time who should get what amount of money based on need,” Marshman told me. “Who is in really bad shape, who cannot feed their children, whose child is going to die if they don’t get medicine, who is going to be executed if I don’t move them into a safe house in Afghanistan, who can be linked together. And honestly, a lot of it is preventing suicide.” When one of the women runs out of food, Marshman sends cash from her own funds. When Noori spent two weeks alone in a Kabul hospital waiting to give birth—because of her military background, it was too risky for her family to visit her—Marshman sent encouraging texts and then money for the C-section. When the Taliban raided a woman’s house, Marshman stayed awake to advise her:

           “Dear Victoria, I’m in danger. Talib came to our house for inspection.”

           “Are you ok? Did they hurt you?”

           “I ran away from home.”

           “Ok. Are you safe now?”

           “My family is in great danger. The Taliban are looking for me and want to arrest me.”

           “I am so sorry and I am very worried. Are you in a safe place now?”

           “I have no place to be safe.”

When a woman reaches an extreme state—when Talibs have discovered a safe house, when a relative has been kidnapped or killed, when money has run out, when suicide seems imminent—Marshman, working with the undercover Afghan staff of two American humanitarian organizations, pays for passports, visas, and the overland journey across the border. Then she takes responsibility for supporting the women and their family through the process, which could stretch years into the future, of applying for refugee status and admittance into the country at whose side they once fought in a two-decade war.

A mystery lies at the heart of any obsessive commitment to strangers. It’s hard but not impossible to understand why Marshman is spending every free moment trying to rescue these women. It’s harder to understand why she’s been joined in her efforts by four other Americans who have no direct experience of Afghanistan at all: her mother, Ann, retired from the corporate world, and three men working in law, business, and entertainment, scattered across the country, and connected to one another and to Marshman by ties so loose, they’re difficult to explain.

One of them, a lawyer named Tom Villalon, was so troubled by how the war ended that he quit his job at the white-shoe law firm Covington & Burling, cashed in his retirement fund, and devoted himself to rescuing a pro bono client’s family still trapped in Afghanistan. He even taught himself Dari, the country’s main language. Eventually, he found his way to Marshman and the others.

“I feel a deep, bizarre connection to this part of the world I never had any interest in,” Villalon, whose professional work had focused on Chinese investment in Latin America, told me. “And part of it is the mystery of this group. I’ve never been exposed to people acting this honorably and to this nobility of character, which you don’t see too much in our society. It changes you and makes you see it’s easier to sacrifice things than it might have seemed.”

The group calls itself Rescue Afghan Women Now. Its existence is entirely informal; the members constantly debate whether incorporation as a tax-exempt nonprofit organization would bring legal and financial advantages or simply result in time-consuming paperwork. It meets weekly by Zoom to discuss current emergencies, weigh difficult decisions, report back on meetings with U.S.-government officials, and worry about finances, which become more and more dire as RAWN incurs more expenses. The group raises almost all of its money through personal ties and at the moment has less than $20,000 on hand. In the past few months, RAWN has moved several threatened families across the border to Pakistan, where the group continues to support them, and its monthly costs now exceed $10,000.

In December, a family on Marshman’s list received a phone call from the Taliban. Khalid Wafa and Sediqa Tajla, who have four children, are another mixed marriage of former commandos. (I have given them pseudonyms because their oldest son remains in Afghanistan.) Tajla, like most women who served in the Afghan special forces, is Hazara; Wafa is Pashtun, which makes him unusual both as a former special-forces soldier and as the husband of a Hazara woman. He still carries a bullet in his shoulder from a combat mission with U.S. Marines. Like Safia Noori and Fakhruddin Elham, the couple went into hiding after the fall of Kabul, traveling the length of Afghanistan and back, running whenever their whereabouts became known. When the phone call came, Wafa told me, they were in Herat, in the far west.

“Are you Khalid?” the caller asked.

“Yes.”

“Where are you at the moment?”

“Jalalabad,” Wafa lied—a city clear across the country, near his hometown.

“When will you come to Kabul?”

“Where in Kabul?”

“I’m calling from a military center.”

Wafa grew tense. He thought he recognized the voice, familiar from media appearances, of Abdul Haq Wasiq, the Taliban’s director of intelligence, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee. Wafa pretended not to understand, and the caller repeated himself several times.

“Why do you want to see me?” Wafa asked. “Is everything all right?”

“We all need to serve our homeland.” The caller made it clear that he knew Wafa’s home address, military record, and extended family’s whereabouts. He reminded him of the Taliban order for all former special-forces soldiers to return to duty—a trap that had cost a friend of Wafa’s his life. “We have received information that you are planning to leave the country. Is this true?”

Wafa denied it and claimed that he was about to start a new job with UNICEF. He said that he had debts to repay, or else he would happily report to Kabul and serve the new government. Before hanging up, the caller demanded that Wafa keep him informed of anyone he knew who had left Afghanistan or planned to leave.

Over the next two months, the family moved almost every night. At one point, Wafa considered fleeing through Iran and Turkey to Europe and earning enough money to get his family out. At another moment, he thought of killing himself. Tajla, his wife, wrote to Marshman: “Dear sister, we have many pains. We dare not even say it. Living among the enemy is not normal. We fought for 20 years. We are not ordinary people. We remain friends of America and NATO. We were fighting for the interests of America and NATO. America and NATO dominate the whole world. America and NATO can help in any way. Will the friendship be the same?”

Marshman now kept in daily contact with the couple, and RAWN paid undercover humanitarian workers in Afghanistan to provide a safe house in Kabul. But one night in late January, Taliban fighters were seen searching houses in the neighborhood. Wafa fled first, and Tajla afterward with the children. She spent hours wandering through the snow, unable to find a taxi that would stop for them or a guesthouse that wouldn’t demand her ID. In the dead of night, her father-in-law arranged for her and the children to stay with an old family friend. The next day they traveled to Jalalabad, where her husband was waiting for them in yet another hideout.

This fugitive existence finally ended when Marshman and her group decided to spend scarce funds to exfiltrate the family to Pakistan. A six-month visa, never easy to obtain, now costs $1,700. But on the last day of February, Wafa, Tajla, and their three younger children were able to cross the border at Torkham to the relative safety of Pakistan (their oldest son is stuck waiting for a passport in Afghanistan). Since then, RAWN has brought two more families out.

On the last night of Ramadan, Wafa, Tajla, and their children traveled from Peshawar to Islamabad to celebrate the feast of Eid with Noori, Elham, Victoria, and another family of new RAWN evacuees. The Americans joined them over Zoom from Hawaii and Connecticut.

“After the fall of the state, this is the first place for us all to come together,” Tajla wrote to Marshman, her text accompanied by a picture of an American flag and the Statue of Liberty. “Thank you dear friend Victoria. All this is the blessing of you and your team.”

“Everyone lives for himself,” Wafa wrote. “But the good life is the one spent in the service of others.”    

Last month, the White House released a 12-page report on the withdrawal from Afghanistan: key decisions, lessons learned. It’s an astonishingly self-congratulatory document. There’s no sign of an actual lesson learned, except that “we now prioritize earlier evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation.” This refers to the evacuation of American embassy personnel—who never faced any serious obstacle to their departure from Kabul—and not to the tens of thousands of Afghans who risked their lives as they tried to flee, and whose earlier evacuation would have done much to prevent the tragic scenes at the airport.

Meanwhile, the Republican-led House of Representatives, amid hearings that pile more blame on the Biden administration, refuses to take up a bill—the Afghan Adjustment Act—that would allow most of the 82,000 Afghans evacuated to this country to receive permanent status and begin living productive lives. Without such a bill, their presence here depends on a series of temporary presidential measures that can be revoked at any time. There is more than enough blame to go around.

The Afghans of this story are, in a sense, as mysterious as the Americans. One mystery is their abiding love for and loyalty to a country—this one—that abandoned them to their fate. Another is their belief in what Tajla called “equality.” She was referring to mixed marriage, but she might have been talking about gender. After all, the network is made up of women, and their survival depends on the strong bonds between them. The men seem to accept this, and during interviews they let their wives do most of the talking. These women and their families, including Victoria, who turned 1 a few days ago, should have been the future of their country. Instead, they’re fugitives with no home in sight.

Of the 206 Afghans on Marshman’s list, 23 are now in Pakistan, unable to work and dependent on RAWN for support. Nearly all of the others remain in Afghanistan under varying degrees of threat. Because they never worked directly for the U.S. government as interpreters, drivers, or other employees, they aren’t eligible for Special Immigrant Visas. (According to the State Department’s most recent report, more than half a million Afghan applicants and dependents are currently in the SIV line; the average wait time for a visa is almost three years.) Instead, the women must be referred—as Afghans who worked closely with American organizations in Afghanistan—to a U.S. program called P-1/P-2, which drops them into an immense pool of refugees around the world who stagnate there for years on end. Of the 50,000 Afghans who have been referred since August 2021, State Department officials told Villalon, not a single one has completed the process and been resettled in the U.S. (The State Department declined to confirm this to me.)

Even worse, U.S. policy requires them to leave Afghanistan for another country in order to be considered refugees. This is expensive, dangerous, and bureaucratically almost impossible anyway: None of Afghanistan’s neighbors, including Pakistan, currently allows the U.S. government to process refugee applications on its soil. The women are trapped whether they stay in Afghanistan or manage to escape across the border.

When I asked the State Department if Afghans like the women on Marshman’s list could be treated as emergency cases—evacuated from Afghanistan to, for example, Qatar, where they could wait in safety while their applications were processed—a spokesperson replied: “The most at-risk among Afghans who need urgent protection” and have been referred to the refugee program “may be considered for relocation.” At the moment this is no more than a notion. It’s hard to know whether the chief bureaucratic obstacle blocking the way for RAWN’s 206 Afghans, and so many others, is lack of staff, pointless rules, or sheer indifference. In the absence of official action, private U.S. citizens are spending their time and money to bring endangered Afghan women to safety.    

There are ways to motivate bureaucracy, and RAWN has brought the plight of female Afghan commandos to the attention of officials at the Department of Defense. “There’s good movement from DOD, but blockage at State,” Villalon said at a recent meeting. “The women get their refugee numbers, but after that it gets stuck. The same randomness with which some of them got out in August 2021—it’s the same now for P-1 processing.”

“I actually think it’s some intern with her coffee making decisions,” Marshman joked.

“The timetable means death, and they don’t get that,” her mother said. “The bureaucratic slowness is killing people.”

Last month, Marshman was invited, with other U.S. military women and the 30 FTPs already evacuated to this country, to a meeting at the Pentagon with top Army officials, including General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Most of the Afghan women had expressed a desire to join the U.S. Army, but their asylum applications are stalled, and they asked for the Pentagon’s help. At one point Marshman spoke up: “Sir, there are still 32 FTPs stuck in Afghanistan.” This was news to Milley. The bureaucratic gears began to turn, and within a few days some of the women on her list received emails acknowledging their refugee applications and setting up interviews.  

Afghanistan is a painful, shameful memory, and most Americans have stopped thinking about it. Even people who worked feverishly to help Afghans escape from the Taliban in August 2021 have mostly moved on. Who can blame them? The need of those left behind in Afghanistan remains overwhelming, and so does the sluggishness of the U.S. government. It goes against human nature that an Army captain, from her post in paradise, is still at it night and day.

“Sometimes being here in Hawaii, at the ends of the Earth, is hard because you are surrounded by so much beauty and peace,” Marshman said. “But nothing really lasts in the end, except kindness. So I just do what I can do for them.”

More than three years ago, the coronavirus pandemic officially became an emergency, and much of the world froze in place while politicians and public-health advisers tried to figure out what on Earth to do. Now the emergency is officially over—the World Health Organization declared so on Friday, and the Biden administration will do the same later this week.

Along the way, almost 7 million people died, according to the WHO, and looking back at the decisions made as COVID spread is, for the most part, a demoralizing exercise. It was already possible to see, in January 2020, that America didn’t have enough masks; in February, that misinformation would proliferate; in March, that nursing homes would become death traps, that inequality would widen, that children’s education, patients’ care, and women’s careers would suffer. What would go wrong has been all too clear from the beginning.

Not every lesson has to be a cautionary tale, however, and the end of the COVID-19 emergency may be, if nothing else, a chance to consider which pandemic policies, decisions, and ideas actually worked out for the best. Put another way: In the face of so much suffering, what went right?

To find out, we called up more than a dozen people who have spent the past several years in the thick of pandemic decision making, and asked: When the next pandemic comes, which concrete action would you repeat in exactly the same way?

What they told us is by no means a comprehensive playbook for handling a future public-health crisis. But they did lay out 23 specific tactics—and five big themes—that have kept the past few years from being even worse.

Good information makes everything else possible. Start immediate briefings for the public. At the beginning of March 2020, within days of New York City detecting its first case of COVID-19, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio began giving daily or near-daily coronavirus press briefings, many of which included health experts along with elected officials. These briefings gave the public a consistent, reliable narrative to follow during the earliest, most uncertain days of the pandemic, and put science at the forefront of the discourse, Jay Varma, a professor of population health at Cornell University and a former adviser to de Blasio, told us. Let everyone see the information you have. In Medway, Massachusetts, for instance, the public-school system set up a data dashboard and released daily testing results.  This allowed the entire affected community to see the impact of COVID in schools, Armand Pires, the superintendent of Medway Public Schools, told us. Be clear that some data streams are better than others. During the first year of the pandemic, COVID-hospitalization rates were more consistent and reliable than, say, case counts and testing data, which varied with testing shortages and holidays, Erin Kissane, the managing editor of the COVID Tracking Project, told us.The project, which grew out of The Atlantic’s reporting on testing data, tracked COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. CTP made a point of explaining where the data came from, what their flaws and shortcomings were, and why they were messy, instead of worrying about how people might react to this kind of information. Act quickly on the data. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, testing made a difference, because the administration acted quickly after cases started rising faster than predicted when students returned in fall of 2020, Rebecca Lee Smith, a UIUC epidemiologist, told us. The university instituted a “stay at home” order, and cases went down—and remained down. Even after the order ended, students and staff continued to be tested every four days so that anyone with COVID could be identified and isolated quickly.   And use it to target the places that may need the most attention. In California, a social-vulnerability index helped pinpoint areas to focus vaccine campaigns on, Brad Pollock, UC Davis’s Rolkin Chair in Public-Health Sciences and the leader of Healthy Davis Together, told us. In this instance, that meant places with migrant farmworkers and unhoused people, but this kind of precision public health could also work for other populations. Engage with skeptics. Rather than ignore misinformation or pick a fight with the people promoting it, Nirav Shah, the former director of Maine’s CDC, decided to hear them out, going on a local call-in radio show with hosts known to be skeptical of vaccines. A pandemic requires thinking at scale. Do pooled testing as early as possible. Medway’s public-school district used this technique, which combines samples from multiple people into one tube and then tests them all at once, to help reopen elementary schools in early 2021, said Pires, the Medway superintendent. Pooled testing made it possible to test large groups of people relatively quickly and cheaply. Choose technology that scales up quickly. Pfizer chose to use mRNA-vaccine tech in part because traditional vaccines are scaled up in stainless-steel vats, Jim Cafone, Pfizer’s senior vice president for global supply chain, told us. If the goal is to vaccinate billions of patients, “there’s not enough stainless steel in the world to do what you need to do,” he said. By contrast, mRNA is manufactured using lipid nanoparticle pumps, many more of which can fit into much less physical space. Take advantage of existing resources. UC Davis repurposed genomic tools normally used for agriculture for COVID testing, and was able to perform 10,000 tests a day,  Pollock, the UC Davis professor, told us. Use the Defense Production Act. This Cold War–era law, which allows the U.S. to force companies to prioritize orders from the government, is widely used in the defense sector. During the pandemic, the federal government invoked the DPA to break logjams in vaccine manufacturing, Chad Bown, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who tracked the vaccine supply chain, told us. For example, suppliers of equipment used in pharmaceutical manufacturing were compelled to prioritize COVID-vaccine makers, and fill-and-finish facilities were compelled to bottle COVID vaccines first—ensuring that the vaccines the U.S. government had purchased would be delivered quickly.   Vaccines need to work for everyone. Recruit diverse populations for clinical trials. Late-stage studies on new drugs and vaccines have a long history of underrepresenting people from marginalized backgrounds, including people of color. That trend, as researchers have repeatedly pointed out, runs two risks: overlooking differences in effectiveness that might not appear until after a product has been administered en masse, and worsening the distrust built up after decades of medical racism and outright abuse. The COVID-vaccine trials didn’t do a perfect job of enrolling participants that fully represent the diversity of America, but they did better than many prior Phase 3 clinical trials despite having to rapidly enroll 30,000 to 40,000 adults, Grace Lee, the chair of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, told us. That meant the trials were able to provide promising evidence that the shots were safe and effective across populations—and, potentially, convince wider swaths of the public that the shots worked for people like them. Try out multiple vaccines. No one can say for sure which vaccines might work or what problems each might run into. So drug companies tested several candidates at once in Phase I trials, Annaliesa Anderson, the chief scientific officer for vaccine research and development at Pfizer, told us; similarly, Operation Warp Speed placed big bets on six different options, Bown, the Peterson Institute fellow, pointed out. Be ready to vet vaccine safety—fast. The rarest COVID-vaccine side effects weren’t picked up in clinical trials. But the United States’ multipronged vaccine-safety surveillance program was sensitive and speedy enough that within months of the shots’ debut, researchers found a clotting issue linked to Johnson & Johnson, and a myocarditis risk associated with Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA shots. They were also able to confidently weigh those risks against the immunizations’ many benefits. With these data in hand, the CDC and its advisory groups were able to throw their weight behind the new vaccines without reservations, said Lee, the ACIP chair. Make the rollout simple. When Maine was determining eligibility for the first round of COVID-19 vaccines, the state prioritized health-care workers and then green-lit residents based solely on age—one of the most straightforward eligibility criteria in the country. Shah, the former head of Maine’s CDC, told us that he and other local officials credit the easy-to-follow system with Maine’s sky-high immunization rates, which have consistently ranked the state among the nation’s most vaccinated regions. Create vaccine pop-ups. For many older adults and people with limited mobility, getting vaccinated was largely a logistical challenge. Setting up temporary clinics where they lived—at senior centers or low-income housing, as in East Boston, for instance—helped ensure that transportation would not be an obstacle for them, said Josh Barocas, an infectious-diseases doctor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Give out boosters while people still want them. When boosters were first broadly authorized and recommended in the fall of 2021, there was a mad rush to immunization lines. In Maine, Shah said, local officials discovered that pharmacies were so low on staff and supplies that they were canceling appointments or turning people away. In response, the state’s CDC set up a massive vaccination center in Augusta. Within days, they’d given out thousands of shots, including both boosters and the newly authorized pediatric shots. Also, spend money. Basic research spending matters. The COVID vaccines wouldn’t have been ready for the public nearly as quickly without a number of existing advances in immunology,  Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told us. Scientists had known for years that mRNA had immense potential as a delivery platform for vaccines, but before SARS-CoV-2 appeared, they hadn’t had quite the means or urgency to move the shots to market. And research into vaccines against other viruses, such as RSV and MERS, had already offered hints about the sorts of genetic modifications that might be needed to stabilize the coronavirus’s spike protein into a form that would marshal a strong, lasting immune response. Pour money into making vaccines before knowing they work. Manufacturing millions of doses of a vaccine candidate that might ultimately prove useless wouldn’t usually be a wise business decision. But Operation Warp Speed’s massive subsidies helped persuade manufacturers to begin making and stockpiling doses early on, Bown said. OWS also made additional investments to ensure that the U.S. had enough syringes and factories to bottle vaccines. So when the vaccines were given the green light, tens of millions of doses were almost immediately available. Invest in worker safety. The entertainment industry poured a massive amount of funds into getting COVID mitigations—testing, masking, ventilation, sick leave—off the ground so that it could resume work earlier than many other sectors. That showed what mitigation tools can accomplish if companies are willing to put funds toward them, Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention expert in Arizona affiliated with George Mason University, told us. Lastly, consider the context. Rely on local relationships. To distribute vaccines to nursing homes, West Virginia initially eschewed the federal pharmacy program with CVS and Walgreens, Clay Marsh, West Virginia’s COVID czar, told us. Instead, the state partnered with local, family-run pharmacies that already provided these nursing homes with medication and flu vaccines. This approach might not have worked everywhere, but it worked for West Virginia. Don’t shy away from public-private partnerships. In Davis, California, a hotelier provided empty units for quarantine housing, Pollock said. In New York City, the robotics firm Opentrons helped NYU scale up testing capacity; the resulting partnership, called the Pandemic Response Lab, quickly slashed wait times for results, Varma, the former de Blasio adviser, said. Create spaces for vulnerable people to get help. People experiencing homelessness, individuals with substance-abuse disorders, and survivors of domestic violence require care tailored to their needs. In Boston, for example, a hospital recuperation unit built specifically for homeless people with COVID who were unable to self-isolate helped bring down hospitalizations in the community overall, Barocas said. Frame the pandemic response as a social movement. Involve not just public-health officials but also schools, religious groups, political leaders, and other sectors. For example, Matt Willis, the public-health officer for Marin County, California, told us, his county formed larger “community response teams” that agreed on and disseminated unified messages.

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