tl;dr:

Lesson 1: Prepare for the long war

When all goes to shit, like in the U.S civil war or WW1, maintain the logistics battle

Lesson 2: Long was the battlefield of formations, now is the battle of concealment

from the Battle of Kadesh to the Siege of Vicksburg (3,137 years), was an epoch of armies that stood up straight in formation. The second epoch, our current epoch, is the epoch of the empty battlefield in which soldiers spend most of their time trying to conceal themselves from the enemy.

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that the era of the empty battlefield is intensifying.

Lesson 3: U.S Hegemony’s tendency to war

One of the great paradoxes of the contemporary world is the self-concealing nature of American power. The United States was dominant in the world for three decades following the fall of the USSR; one of the effects of this power has been success at cloaking itself in a consensus-driven internationalism.

Fundamentally, while American might was unchallenged, American foreign policy was always careful to avoid endorsing the idea that ‘might makes right’. Indeed, performatively shunning a kinetic, power-based world has been a foundational brick in the current world order. Even though America’s colossal power animated the entire system, the world formally disavowed the classical theory of geopolitics that recognized state power at its center.

Together with the formal rejection of state power as the currency of world affairs, paradoxically made possible only by the state power of the United States, came the rejection of ideas like “spheres of influence” – the principle that powerful states naturally attain the right to influence affairs in their weaker neighbors. The idea of spheres of influence is foundational to international politics: it is embodied in American history by the Monroe Doctrine.