As a young infantry officer in the United States Army, I spent a lot of time trudging through the woods. It was rarely the graceful, stealthy experience depicted in recruiting commercials, but rather the resigned shuffling of heavily burdened men walking with all the grace of turtles. Soldiers inevitably tripped and fell, and over time I noticed a recurring pattern. With a crash and quiet cursing, the turtle in front of me would fall on his back, having failed to negotiate a fallen log across our path. And then, while I was silently mocking my comrade for his inability to navigate an obvious obstacle, my own foot would catch the hole hidden on the back side of the log, and I would join him in a tangle of weapons and gear.
That experience, clumsy as it was both in reality and as metaphor, increasingly comes to mind when I consider the legacy of our post-9/11 wars. Having grown up in the aftermath of Vietnam, my father’s war, I started my Army career with a firm belief that our military could learn from experience and adapt over time. Our conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan revealed that faith to be wildly naïve. World War II veteran Paul Fussell once said, “To become disillusioned you must earlier have been illusioned.” For my part, I don’t think I had many illusions about military service at the outset. But my military education inculcated them in me over time, and it took years for me to fully comprehend the plodding bureaucratic reality behind the failure of those campaigns.
My high school coming-of-age was marked by indecisiveness and indifference. Moving around the world in an Army family, I experienced the whiplash of beginning high school among military brats on a base in South Korea before ultimately graduating from a school in the middle of Missouri where anyone not clearly identified as Black or white might be casually referred to as a “half-breed.” Although I’d grown up listening to soldiers gripe about the inefficiencies of the system, the Army didn’t seem like such a bad way to get out of that place. That I was considering it at all, in a society increasingly divorced from the military, placed me in that small caste of Americans for whom military service is a family business.
Being one of the very few military kids in my high school, I also saw the visit of a West Point recruiter as a plausible excuse for skipping out of English class. My idea of military schools had come largely from the 1981 movie Taps, and I had no desire to plunge into the Toy Story meets Lord of the Flies atmosphere depicted there. But the recruiter’s description of the actual United States Military Academy caught my attention. I decided that if I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, there were worse places to figure that out than one that offered physical challenges and a free education. So began my illusionment.
For decades, Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers has been taught in elective classes at West Point, and I first picked up a copy as a cadet. I found it fascinating: the certainty and righteousness of military service; the elevation of the military to the preeminent position in political life; the clarity and lack of equivocation about the utility of force. Starship Troopers told me everything I wanted to hear as a young infantryman-to-be, and I studiously highlighted and underlined the great quotes and insights into military life. After finishing it, I eagerly lent it to a civilian friend from high school. He returned it a few months later and thanked me for going out of my way to highlight the “especially fascist bits.”
Written in 1959 by a young Navy veteran horrified by the advance of Communism, the book still appealed to a young soldier in the 1990s looking for validation of his career choice. Unfortunately, the political universe that Heinlein created could exist only in the context of a subhuman enemy—in this case, actual “bugs.” Heinlein conjured up a world where the brave, facing hordes of arachnoid aliens, answered the call of duty while the selfish and cowardly offered excuses for not joining the fight. It made no sense to try to understand the aliens’ point of view: they weren’t human, after all. As for history, in humanity’s hour of maximum danger, it was irrelevant. I liked to think of myself as having a slightly more refined view, but I could certainly appreciate a role in society where you could be both celebrated and paid handsomely for your work but still get to call yourself a servant.
I spent my first years in the military on the periphery of minor conflicts around the world. A U-turn at the southern tip of Florida during a planned invasion of Haiti—Raoul Cédras, the country’s dictator, capitulated while we were in midair—was as close as I got to combat. Instead, I got to do a lot of training jumps out of airplanes, a lot of stumbling around in the woods, and generally lived what we called the Peter Pan lifestyle: playing soldier without having to grow up. That period of my life culminated with command of a company of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles cavorting across the deserts of Kuwait along the Iraqi border after Desert Storm, back when the United States still believed in deterrence. And then, as the saying goes, everything changed.
The morning of 9/11 found me in New York City. I had just started classes at Columbia University in preparation for a teaching assignment at West Point. In the chaos of the city that morning, I found my way to a fire station, explaining that I was an Army captain and ready to assist. The policeman taping off the area said I should get ready to deploy. But to my frustration, I was relegated to observing the unfolding conflict from afar.
Stuck in New York, far from the fight, I became acutely aware of America’s relationship with its military. The American flags in every store made the city feel more welcoming to soldiers than normal. But as the months passed and the flags faded, I had a growing sense that this was a hastily arranged marriage, doomed to end in disappointment. The images of the technological dominance of the first Gulf War, followed by the daring, lightning victory over the Taliban in the first year of the War in Afghanistan, made the American public expect triumphant success from the military—and made members of the military expect unquestioning adoration from the public. But as the Iraq War contentiously began and then foundered, the American romance with “the troops” wore thin. Replacing it was a respectful indifference that would largely define the relationship for the remainder of the wars.
As for me, in 2005 I finally made it to Iraq. Having volunteered to deploy from West Point, I was assigned to a military cell in the Republican Palace in Baghdad, tasked with helping to coordinate military and diplomatic efforts. It was a great place to be for someone interested in political science, but not at all a place for bolstering one’s confidence in the American war machine. Not only were our diplomatic and military initiatives completely separated—literally so by secure doors between State Department and military personnel—but we didn’t even have a clue about what kind of war we were in. Were we withdrawing soon or settling into a long occupation? No one knew.
The rediscovery of a doctrine known as counterinsurgency offered glimmers of hope. After I redeployed home, Iraq’s growing civil war and a political drubbing in America’s 2006 midterm elections finally forced a hesitating commander in chief to try a different approach to the war, providing an opening for this rediscovered doctrine. Counterinsurgency calls for a merging of political and military considerations, focusing on winning the “hearts and minds” of the local population rather than just combat operations against insurgent forces. Back at West Point, I was a distant and, as it turned out, gullible consumer of encouraging news about the military’s embrace of this concept.
The reality of units on the ground was much different. After returning to a conventional unit in 2007, I realized that there was actually little interest in employing counterinsurgency doctrine, nor any real capacity for it. With two wars in full swing, the period between deployments was a mad dash to change out chains of command, onboard new soldiers, and train as best one could while often unsure even which country one might be deployed to. Matters of culture and language understandably took a back seat to ensuring that units could meet the basic standards of tactical proficiency.
Even once uncertainty of our destination was resolved—we were going to Afghanistan—there was little chance of gaining an understanding of local politics. In the soup of reported terrorist and insurgent organizations, we could barely figure out whom we would even be fighting. In retrospect it didn’t matter. The fact is, we were going to lump all our enemies together and ignore the politics anyway.
Shortly after my unit’s arrival in Afghanistan in 2009, we were beset by an eager counterintelligence team from higher headquarters. They needed us to arrest a man by the name of Haji Jan Daad, identified as having connections with some unsavory characters. After some absurdist comedy involving confusion over which Haji Jan Daad we were supposed to roll up (there were two, it turned out, and they were enemies), we determined that the man in question was a contractor and power broker whom we met with regularly. Americans had worked more closely with him during the first years of our presence in Kunar Province, until they learned more about his violent past and stopped contracting with him directly. But he still controlled various construction companies that had a part in most anything being built in Kunar. As a consequence, the atrocities he was reported to have committed in the 1990s were largely overlooked.
My unit knew little about Haji Jan Daad’s background and less about the intelligence connecting him to our enemies, so we had some doubts about detaining him. Still, we cuffed him and put him on a helicopter to the detention facility in Bagram. He never arrived.
We hadn’t hidden his detention but arrested him publicly, and the word went out quickly. So quickly, in fact, that before the helicopter made it to Bagram, President Karzai’s office called the senior coalition commander, demanding his release. Haji Jan Daad got a free ride to the presidential palace. And if that didn’t make our error sufficiently clear, about a week after we arrested him, his son was appointed as deputy director of the National Directorate of Security (the Afghan equivalent of the FBI) for Kunar. Later that summer, Haji Jan Daad was one of two local elders appointed to head up Karzai’s reelection effort in the province.
This should have been a dramatic wake-up call that we needed to better understand the relationships and motivations of our Afghan partners. But with summer approaching and the fighting season ramping up, we focused instead on taking the fight to the enemy. Someone else would have to untangle the complicated loyalties of local political leaders. And as my 2009 deployment wound down, it appeared that this “someone else” would soon appear: the State Department announced it would be flooding the country with advisors down to the district level. I also saw promise in our plans to assist the Afghans in building their own army, instead of doing all the fighting ourselves. Still naïvely optimistic, I lined up an assignment that would get me back to Afghanistan a few years later.
My optimism proved short-lived. By the time I returned in 2012, “green on blue” attacks—members of the Afghan military shooting Americans—had become increasingly common, and one of my first tasks was to investigate a point-blank shoot-out that had erupted when an American unit dropped in unannounced on an Afghan checkpoint. Figuring out what had happened was like untangling Rashomon. It was made even more difficult by the language barrier and the deaths of those most directly involved.
We interrogated the surviving Afghans at a detention facility where the officer in charge took special pride in highlighting how they had some of the best interpreters in the country. Attempting to find out what had transpired at the Afghan platoon headquarters prior to the attack, we asked a young soldier if he had interacted with the main shooting suspect. He replied that he had been at the company headquarters and had not seen the suspect. But the interpreter, not familiar with military terminology—a regular platoon has about forty soldiers; a company, composed of several platoons, might have well over a hundred—left out the word for “company.” The interrogator could not believe the Afghan could have been at the small platoon headquarters and not seen the suspect in question. The conversation grew increasingly heated, to the point where I had to intervene. But when I explained to the interrogator that she and the Afghan had been talking past each other, she dismissed it in fury: “I just know he’s been lying to me.” And that was pretty much the state of our efforts in Afghanistan in 2012.
Meanwhile, the plans of a grand surge of civilian political advisors had never come to fruition, leaving the US military in charge and adrift. We continued to go through the motions of building a national army for a nation that did not exist, becoming increasingly frustrated with the Afghans for not having a country better suited to our plans.
Much of this work involved pouring billions of dollars into constructing military bases. Touring nearly fifty outposts and bases with my Afghan counterpart in the provinces of eastern Afghanistan, I saw remarkable uniformity, along with uniformly shoddy construction. Contracting for this construction was never done via Afghan military leadership; the responsibility was parceled out between American military engineers and contracting officers, who took their cues from the US commanders responsible for security in a given province. The occupants of these positions all reported to different chains of command and saw regular turnover, meaning there was little coordination. The cohort overseeing the construction could be several generations removed from those who had conceived of the project in the first place, ultimately leaving no one responsible for ill-conceived or poorly executed projects.
It was an insane way to run a massive construction effort, but a great way to avoid accountability for what we built. We could look at multimillion-dollar runways and military compounds sitting unused and unoccupied, and just shrug it off as a cost of war. The whole thing was on credit with the American taxpayer anyway. With that unique mix of blind ambition, profligacy, and indifference to results, it took us only a few short years to build an abandoned, colossal wreck that made the works of Ozymandias seem truly eternal by comparison.
Leaving Afghanistan in 2013, I returned a year later for a brief final visit to assess the advisory effort. The trip coincided with the Afghan presidential election, hailed as Afghanistan’s first-ever democratic transfer of power. From a security perspective, it appeared to be a resounding success. There were few significant attacks, and I observed election day from an Afghan corps headquarters that was replete with tracking maps, quick reaction plans, and fire coordination cells. But it was all theater. The idea that the Afghans were securing their own election was a charade. Hidden behind the curtain was the US military, which was maintaining an air superiority blanket over the country day and night and frenetically using its intelligence assets to intercept car bombs coming in from Pakistan.
This effort, paired with the actual election outcome—a fractured government and accusations of widespread fraud—made clear that our final strategy was to prop up the Afghan forces until a government magically arose that could maintain security and be seen as legitimate by the people. It was disheartening but not unexpected. American military leaders kept rotating through, each rating his own individual effort as a resounding success. In the meantime, nobody at home seemed interested enough in the war to demand that someone take ownership of the overall failure.
ON REFLECTION, I’VE come to recognize three factors that turned our military’s plan for the war into a shambles. The first is the perennial optimism unique to the military, which is a helpful mindset when asking soldiers to take on personal risk but not especially useful for taking on tasks one is not trained for. A common opinion among senior military leaders in the 1990s was that a unit that could handle high-intensity combat operations could easily handle any other type of conflict. This may have been true for pre-9/11 peacekeeping deployments and the like, but after 9/11 this attitude ballooned into a conviction that members of the military had skills well beyond those specifically related to warfighting.
The self-assurance reached the apex of delusion when military leaders bragged about young officers serving as de facto mayors for villages in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was true that by virtue of the war, these officers had the authority that came with weapons and a direct line to reconstruction funds, but their competence in handling a decidedly unconventional battlefield was another question. More important, no one ever thought about what the situation must have felt like to the locals. No one considered how an American town might react to a twenty-six-year-old from the federal government taking control of the local police force and major contracting decisions—let alone how we might respond if, say, Chinese military officers tried to run an American city.
In the early phases of the war in Iraq, I encountered several young officers embittered that their efforts to build schools and support orphans did not somehow settle long-standing religious and ethnic hatreds and local blood feuds. But then again, we never required officers to stick around long enough to force them beyond a superficial understanding of local politics. It was easier to blame our failures on local cultures than on our lack of interest in actually understanding those cultures.
Beyond the dysfunction that uncritical optimism can produce, the second factor in our failures was the unstoppable momentum of military bureaucracy. Even when we realized, at least in theory, that it would be good to work “by, with, and through” our foreign counterparts as our doctrine espoused, it was not clear that we could adapt the military to that task.
As we grappled with the chaos of Iraq in 2005–6, many military leaders understood, and increasingly stated publicly, that the way out of Iraq was via building a new Iraqi army that could secure the nascent government. It therefore followed that training this army was the US military’s most important mission. Except it never was. At the Army’s Command and General Staff College, officers have some say in where they want to be assigned next, and in the mid-2000s taking an assignment to train the Iraqi army was decidedly the last-place option. It simply did not fit within established career timelines and paths to further promotion. The military’s incentive structures were closely tied to conventional warfare, not counterinsurgency, and there was no intention of changing that.
The same dynamic manifested itself in Afghanistan as well. Stanley McChrystal, who took command of American forces in Afghanistan in 2009, was one of the military’s smartest and most reflective leaders. When he visited our unit that year, he asked each of us: “What would you do differently if you had to stay until we won?” It was absolutely the right question. But in retrospect it was also a useless question. The answer was to get the right people into the fight, keep them there long enough to develop an understanding of the environment, and hold them accountable for progress. But that was not something the military was interested in doing. Instead, McChrystal and other commanders were tasked with winning the war without disrupting the established military personnel system, and they would stay in their lane even if it meant the effort was doomed to come up short.
To keep the existing career management and promotion systems intact, the military rotated personnel through Afghanistan like tourists. An entire unit would come into the country, stay for seven to twelve months, and then get swapped out again. We stayed just long enough to become exasperated with the locals for not meeting our expectations and to fulfill preconceived notions of what we should do while there. More often than not, this meant we pursued tactical measures of success with only superficial nods to training Afghan forces.
Faced with the complexity of Afghan politics, it was always easier, and institutionally more rewarded, to focus on metrics we knew. We executed ever-larger air assaults because it was the kind of thing we could compare to the battles and leaders we idolized from Vietnam. We even adopted the maligned Vietnam-era emphasis on body counts, just dressed up with new technology and called targeting. The illusion that we knew exactly whom we were killing prevented us from ever asking how many times we could possibly kill the “second-in-command” of a specific insurgent cell. It took a long time for many of us to realize that the ever-larger piles of dead enemies might not be a sign of success but an indicator of a fundamentally failed strategy that was pushing ordinary Afghans to side with our opponents. Then again, the emphasis on metrics of violence meant that the creation of a perpetual violence machine was a bonus for our individual careers, even if the whole endeavor was destined to fail.
We were allowed to drift nearly indefinitely in this fantasy of progress because of the third key factor: no one at home felt they could or should question those in the fight. With the advent of the all-volunteer force in the early 1970s, Americans no longer felt tied to the military unless they wanted to be. And with a force built around high-tech weapons systems, the military never needed more than a fraction of a percent of Americans in uniform.
This gap between the military and American society resulted in a significant shift in American discussions about war. No longer could there be said to be active antiwar and pro-war camps. Instead, the range of acceptable discourse about the military now stretched from respectful indifference to unquestioning fandom. Neither of these promoted criticism or even adequate oversight of the military effort. Without a war tax or a draft, those who did not approve of the way the conflict was being handled could look at it as just a remote, academic question that never required their sustained attention.
As it turns out, public indifference was harmful to the effort, particularly when combined with the norm of uniformed service members not criticizing or publicly questioning their orders or American foreign policy. The perennial optimism and mission focus of the military meant that the public only heard a steady stream of cheery can-do pronouncements from military leaders and silence from the junior service members who may not have shared that optimism but did not feel free to speak publicly. In that climate, political and military leaders could count on the public to tolerate the War in Afghanistan almost indefinitely, as long as the costs stayed relatively low—which after our drawdown in 2014 meant about $20 billion to $40 billion and a dozen American lives per year.
Yet while such indifference from large swaths of the public allowed our military efforts to drift for years without effective oversight, it is the unquestioning adoration of the military by much of America that continues to do the most damage. Amid a collapse in confidence in American institutions like Congress, the courts, the presidency, big business, and even churches, the American military is the last institution left standing. This should not be interpreted to mean that the public approves of what the military does, but rather that it remains enamored with the vision of what it believes the military to be.
Steeped in decades of action hero movies and industrial-scale propaganda about the military, it is no wonder that many Americans view military force as the easy-button solution to complex challenges. In the view of too many, American armed forces can not only defeat all enemies but also solve even nonmilitary problems. This gives the military a status and degree of autonomy unique among public bureaucracies.
Such absolute faith in the military has enabled a peculiar accountability-avoidance two-step that both generals and politicians find advantageous. Political leaders can appear strong by putting the military in charge of even the most inappropriate missions, like nation-building, without worrying that the public might ask hard questions about the mission’s feasibility or the military’s suitability for that mission. And ambitious military leaders can then play the role of soldier-statesmen, basking in public adoration, but with no responsibility for the outcome of their efforts. After all, if a plan does not work out, they were “just following orders,” and the ultimate fault must lie with elected politicians. Ultimately, no one ends up being held accountable.
In the fallout over our fiasco in Afghanistan, politicians who largely ignored the conflict for twenty years dug into problems with our withdrawal with just enough fervor to score partisan points. Meanwhile, the military leaders of that war effort stepped up to cast blame on the politicians while ignoring their own crucial role in shaping policy.
Much of this was individual reputation management from those who became the public faces of the war. For members of the military in less high-ranking or high-profile positions, blaming someone outside the military was also a logical step. After all, as we rotated through Afghanistan, everyone’s individual efforts were graded as an A, and every participant got a trophy at the end: end-of-tour awards doled out on the basis of rank and position, with performance being at most a tangential factor. So if the overall effort ended up as a failure, surely someone else besides the military was to blame.
To prevent another cycle of military debacles, veterans must take the lead in voicing criticism. Those who bore the brunt of the costs of this war are most familiar with its inefficiencies and shortcomings. They understand the vast chasm between the public pronouncements of our leadership and the reality on the ground. They are also the only ones with the standing to challenge an institution that has become the new third rail of American politics—an institution applauded at sporting events but never questioned about what it does overseas.
Unfortunately, challenging the public’s veneration for the military is difficult, both for veterans and those still serving, who are increasingly likely to view themselves as part of a foreign, misunderstood tribe. In the cacophony of public debates, it is easiest to keep one’s head down and let the politicians take the fall for post-9/11 military disappointments, in effect resurrecting the “stab in the back” narrative from Vietnam.
In the 1990s and 2000s, we told ourselves repeatedly that we had exorcised the ghosts of our fathers’ war. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan exposed this as delusion. Understanding how we replicated that failure therefore starts with recognizing that we are recycling the same excuses they made—excuses that gave them a reason not to learn from their own mistakes. Allowing those narratives to take hold increases the likelihood of stepping confidently into the next war, with no idea of why we tripped and fell in the last one.