In response to the 9/11 attacks, the United States plunged willy-nilly into a war that political authorities explicitly characterized as global. Few observers at the time objected to the formulation. For a globally preeminent power, a war undertaken on a scale acknowledging no limits seemed eminently plausible.
To say that things haven’t gone well since is to engage in considerable understatement. Interventions begun with high hopes of quick, decisive victories led instead to protracted, inconclusive, and exceedingly costly campaigns. The world’s self-proclaimed greatest military found success elusive. In the case of Afghanistan, twenty years of exertions culminated in unambiguous “strategic failure,” a judgment offered by none other than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The American people have yet to reckon with the implications of military miscalculations and disappointments stretching back to the beginning of this century. Lest they be charged with failing to “support the troops,” ordinary Americans shy away from inquiring too deeply into the cumulative errors of judgment and execution that have marred recent US military misadventures. And if mere citizens are disinclined to confront those failures, members of the nation’s political and military elite are even less willing to do so.
A conviction that such a reckoning is both necessary and long overdue inspired this book. Paths of Dissent offers insights into how and why recent US military efforts have gone so badly astray. Flagrant malpractice by those at the top inflicted untold damage on the troops we ostensibly esteem, on populations US policymakers vowed to liberate, and ultimately on our own democracy. The adverse effects of war are by no means confined to the immediate arena in which fighting occurs.
By their very nature, wars are complex. Authoritative truth regarding any war is necessarily hard to establish. Arriving at even an approximation of the truth requires tapping into varied and perhaps even contradictory perspectives.
In practice, when it comes to staking out claims to truth about any war, those who wield power—presidents, cabinet secretaries, senior advisors, and top field commanders—occupy positions of privilege. They possess the biggest megaphones. Granted preferred access to the media and opportunities to publish widely reviewed and read memoirs, they disseminate their own inevitably self-exculpatory versions of the story. More often than not, they obscure rather than clarify.
Danny Sjursen and I conceived this book to give voice to a different group: veterans of our post-9/11 conflicts who in a time of war freely volunteered to serve and then developed second thoughts about the conflicts in which they participated. We invited these military dissenters to bear witness to what they saw, did, and learned. We asked them in particular to reflect on what had brought them to the military in the first place, and how the realities they encountered might have differed from their expectations. Given our nation’s notable propensity for war, combined with a general aversion to actually donning the uniform—those who serve tend to come only from “military families” and the economically deprived—the candid firsthand testimonials contained in this book amount to an instructive exercise in civic education.
With just a single exception, everyone whose words appear in this book is a veteran of our nation’s post-9/11 wars. Several completed multiple combat tours. In many respects, they are a diverse group. They are male and female, of varied ethnicities and upbringings, veterans of service in different branches of the armed forces. Some fought as foot soldiers; others served as artillerymen, combat engineers, intelligence specialists, and in assorted other capacities. Some were commissioned officers, others members of the rank and file. A few briefly tasted a simulacrum of victory, participating in the initial, hopeful stages of wars where actual success was destined to remain out of reach. Others arrived after stalemate had long since set in.
The one exception is myself. I am a veteran, but not of Iraq or Afghanistan. I participated in a different war, though one equally misguided, mismanaged, and wasteful: Vietnam. And I have come to appreciate the connecting tissue linking my own experience of a half century ago to that of these much younger veterans.
My tour of duty in Vietnam occurred during the war’s later phases, after the turning point of the 1968 Tet Offensive, and after it had become abundantly clear (even to a green-as-grass lieutenant) that events were headed toward a less-than-satisfactory outcome. Subsequent decades, spent first on active duty and then as a teacher and writer, brought me to a deeper understanding of the Vietnam War and sharpened my appreciation of what it signified. With the passage of time, I concluded that classifying Vietnam as either a mistake or a tragedy amounts to little more than subterfuge. To use those terms is to evade a much deeper and more troubling truth. In fact, from its very earliest stages until its mortifying conclusion, America’s war in Vietnam was a crime.
That realization played a large role in propelling me on my own belated path toward dissent, a role that has never come naturally to me. By upbringing and early education, I am inclined to defer to authority. Four years of intense socialization as a cadet at West Point reinforced this tendency. As a youth and young adult, even into middle age, I was inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the official lines handed down from on high, whether by high-ranking government officials, senior military commanders, or cardinal archbishops of my church. Their ascent to positions atop the relevant hierarchy testified to their personal worthiness and to the basic integrity of the institutions over which they presided. Or so I believed, in the face of ever more abundant evidence to the contrary.
Some of us learn quickly, others less so. It has always been my lot to be a slow learner.
On that score, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq served for me as a final tipping point. The latter in particular, an illegitimate war of choice utterly divorced from US security interests and the well-being of the American people, played a decisive role in completing my education.
The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the debacle that ensued brought into sharp focus the disastrous implications of the interventionist turn in US policy that had followed the end of the Cold War. Midway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, with US forces bogged down in two unwinnable wars and various other lesser contingencies, it became evident that policymakers and generals alike had either forgotten the mistakes that doomed US efforts in Vietnam or were seemingly intent on repeating them.
Ignorance, incompetence, and mind-boggling hubris combined to produce the cataclysm of the Vietnam War. Those same qualities pervaded the planning and implementation of the several campaigns on which the United States embarked in the aftermath of 9/11. That the United States had resumed its march to military folly within my own lifetime was beyond distressing. It was cause for mourning.
My personal role in Vietnam had been utterly inconsequential. So, too, was my contribution to the post-Vietnam reforms implemented to purge the United States Army of toxins it had absorbed during that war. Informed by visions of war as primarily a technological undertaking, those reforms turned out to be wildly misconceived. Instead of restoring a badly abused institution to health, they instead introduced a different set of ills. Above all, by fostering delusions of military mastery, they set the stage for grotesque misjudgments.
In this way, America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are stepchildren of Vietnam, as are the various other post-9/11 campaigns that have destroyed the US military’s reputation for prowess and the nation’s claim to global primacy. Many aspects of Vietnam remain contentious, but of this we can be certain: rarely has an excruciating experience yielded such a paltry harvest of learning.
The contributors to this collection experienced firsthand the consequences of this inability (or refusal) to learn. While leaders of governments and armies are well practiced at concealing folly beneath a veneer of purposefulness, the writers lending their talents to this book strip away that veneer, bearing witness to truths that politicians and generals would prefer to remain hidden. In doing so, they perform an invaluable service for their country.
WHILE MILITARY DISSENT may not be as American as apple pie, it is a motif that recurs throughout US history. Whether consciously or not, post-9/11 military dissenters are part of a long if underappreciated tradition.
Most Americans take it for granted that those serving in the armed forces of the United States are compliant, if not altogether politically inert. As a broad judgment, this is mostly correct. Both individually and collectively, US troops routinely demonstrate the discipline that is an essential predicate to even minimal military effectiveness. They obey orders and are reliably subservient to the chain of command.
But mostly is not entirely. And the exceptions can be illuminating.
That said, it is important to distinguish military dissent from other forms of protest. As used here, military dissent is not synonymous with opposition to war in general. For our purposes, military dissenters are serving soldiers or combat veterans who actively oppose military policies that they deem ill advised, illegal, or morally unconscionable.
Not every act of resistance by a current or former service member qualifies. Opposition stemming from bureaucratic rivalries—the 1949 “Revolt of the Admirals,” for instance, in which leaders of the US Navy fought against budget reallocations that favored the Air Force—does not fit our definition. Genuine military dissent transcends parochial considerations. A similar judgment applies to unrest involving GIs stationed overseas following the end of World War II. In no mood to comply with War Department plans for an orderly demobilization, the troops wanted to go home immediately, and rioted on a massive scale. This was not dissent; it was a de facto mutiny, and it succeeded.
Genuine military dissent is patriotic. It expresses a determination to right wrongs, especially policies that victimize US troops without yielding any discernible benefit to the nation. Military dissenters are not self-seeking. Their commitment is to a cause larger than themselves.
So military dissent can’t be a cause casually adopted and then quickly abandoned. It becomes an ongoing obligation or calling. It entails a sustained and inherently political commitment, whether carried out alone or as part of a collective.
Military dissent is not easy. While on active duty, military dissenters often annoy, exasperate, or provoke the chain of command. Some may face disciplinary action, including courts-martial. Others eventually resign in protest or are involuntarily separated from active duty. Upon returning to civilian life, military dissenters carry on their activism in myriad ways. They join antiwar organizations. They lobby elected officials and, if invited, testify before Congress. They may run for office themselves. They teach, bringing their firsthand experiences into the classroom. To reflect more deeply on their encounter with war, they write memoirs, compose novels and poetry, and make documentary films. In books, essays, and interviews, they take issue with US military policies, whether past or present. In short, they persist.
During the Vietnam War, military dissent was sustained and widespread, involving many thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. It took many forms, some of which intersected with an array of pathologies at odds with “good order and discipline.” Military dissent did not cause but cannot be easily separated from those pathologies: pervasive indiscipline, widespread drug use, acute racial tension, and an epidemic of violence that often targeted superiors.
These maladies were not limited to a particular service or cohort, nor were they confined to the war zone itself. The effects were felt at home and abroad, on land and at sea, wherever US forces were to be found. And Vietnam-induced military dissent, even more broadly, transcended the boundaries separating service life from the civilian world. It both drew on and fed the unrest that was roiling American society during the 1960s and 1970s. In that sense, it was part of a larger social movement centered on the rejection of traditional norms and a loss of confidence in established authority.
Generals and admirals at the time struggled without noticeable success to suppress this contagion. Soon enough, it became evident that restoring good order and discipline would require a political solution. In 1973, President Richard Nixon and a compliant Congress provided that solution, scrapping the concept of the citizen-soldier that since the Revolution had formed the basis of the American military system and replacing it with what came to be called the “all-volunteer force.”
THE ALL-VOLUNTEER FORCE (AVF) was a late-twentieth-century reincarnation of the “standing army” that America’s founders in the late eighteenth century had decried as a threat to liberty. In the wake of the Vietnam War, a generation of political leaders desperate for an alternative to conscription disregarded the founders’ concerns. To induce young men and women to serve, the new military system emphasized better pay and benefits, while reducing “chickenshit,” the day-to-day hassles that made so much of military life for ordinary GIs something between a trial and a total waste of time. Henceforth, military service would take on the trappings of a profession, with even recruits treated less like disposable day laborers and more like valued employees. It was tacitly understood by all that there would be no more Vietnams.
The experiment got off to a rocky start, as attracting qualified volunteers in sufficient numbers to fill the force proved a challenge. By the 1990s, however, the AVF seemed to be working well enough, albeit without having undergone a test more serious than the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
That conflict, lasting only a handful of weeks, entailed only the barest amount of close combat, none of it sustained. Enemy resistance proved to be tepid at best. Even so, civilian and military leaders alike, not to mention a cheerleading media, chose to enshrine Operation Desert Storm as an unprecedented triumph that validated post-Vietnam military arrangements. With that, the AVF took its place alongside Social Security and Medicare as politically untouchable. Americans congratulated themselves on having devised a military system that was both extraordinarily effective and also nicely suited to a democratic republic with a limited appetite for sacrifice. Everyone in uniform and out could take satisfaction with the result.
Soon enough, however, events exposed such satisfaction as misplaced. The real test of the AVF came after 9/11. Responding to the attacks on New York and Washington, an administration confident of US military supremacy embarked upon an open-ended Global War on Terrorism. Centered initially in Afghanistan and Iraq, the GWOT thrust US troops into extensive combat against determined adversaries. The resulting campaigns dragged on for years.
Once it became clear that decisive victory was not in the offing, comparisons with Vietnam inevitably materialized. Most of those comparisons, though, were off target for a multitude of reasons. For our purposes, two differences in particular stand out.
The first has to do with the public response to wars gone awry. Americans had reacted with anger and dismay when the war in Vietnam went badly but proved remarkably tolerant of the disappointments encountered in Afghanistan and Iraq. In twenty-first-century America, to “support the troops” was a civic duty to which all citizens at least paid lip service. Yet this did not imply any requirement to attend to what the troops were actually called upon to do and with what results. Supporting the troops might entail striking a posture, but it imposed no substantive obligations.
So while many Americans disagreed with the course of post-9/11 military policies, especially as the wars dragged on with precious little to celebrate, nothing remotely comparable to the Vietnam-era antiwar movement developed. The nation might have been nominally “at war,” but ordinary citizens tended to other priorities. That the absence of a draft might have contributed to this collective apathy regarding failed wars figures as at least a possibility.
The second important reason why comparisons with Vietnam do not hold up is that while US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan did not prevail, neither did they buckle. The AVF proved to be largely immune to the maladies that had virtually destroyed the armed forces of the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even as multiple combat tours took their toll on individual soldiers and marines, durability emerged as an institutional hallmark of the AVF. In other words, just as the American public did not revolt against manifestly defective post-9/11 military policies, neither did the rank-and-file troops called upon to implement those policies.
As the post-9/11 conflicts dragged on, phrases such as endless wars or forever wars found their way into the American lexicon. Politicians campaigning for high office vowed to terminate these wars. Once elected, however, they discovered other priorities. Rather than ending wars, they perpetuated them in modified form.
Through it all, the post-Vietnam military system remained sacrosanct. In effect, protecting the AVF from critical scrutiny took precedence over achieving success on the battlefield or holding policymakers accountable for persisting in futile military misadventures.
That the all-volunteer force meshes with US national security policy while also conforming to American democratic ideals became one of the Big Lies to which political, military, corporate, and media elites routinely paid tribute. While disagreement on this point might be permitted—sporadic calls for restoring the draft or enacting a program of national service were heard—such eccentric proposals gained no discernible traction beyond the occasional mention in op-eds. Out there in Afghanistan and Iraq, the AVF might not have been delivering the intended results, but at home it remained agreeably convenient.
That was the political and military environment in which the contributors to this volume volunteered to serve their country: a time of prolonged armed conflict that exacted a terrible toll while making at best a negligible contribution to international security or the well-being of the American people.
IAN FISHBACK, TO whose memory this volume is dedicated, was one of those volunteers who subsequently saw through the Big Lie and confronted it. Over the course of his military career, Fishback exemplified all that is best in the American tradition of military dissent. Yet the arc of his life also testifies to the costs that principled dissent can exact. In November 2021, shortly before Paths of Dissent went into production, he died. He was just forty-two years of age.
Should a memorial honoring the US troops who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan one day grace the Washington Mall, Major Fishback’s name will surely deserve to be included—this, despite the fact that he died years after leaving active duty. He sacrificed his life for this nation no less than did the several thousand who fell in battle.
For a brief moment in the early years of our post-9/11 wars, Fishback achieved a measure of fame (or, to some, notoriety) by calling attention to the torture and prisoner abuse practiced by US forces in the field. He was a uniformed whistleblower, who took seriously the values of “Duty, Honor, Country” he had learned at West Point. A classic straight arrow, Ian found intolerable even the slightest deviation from what the soldierly code of conduct required.
Encountering credible allegations of widespread misconduct by US troops, Fishback—as was his duty—brought those allegations to the attention of members of his chain of command. When they tried to brush him off or suggested that pursuing the matter might adversely affect his career, he refused to be silenced.
With very senior military officers thereby complicit (in Fishback’s judgment) in a cover-up, he pressed on, bringing the matter to the attention of human rights organizations, members of the press, and eventually sympathetic legislators such as Senator John McCain (R-AZ). The eventual upshot was congressional passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, prohibiting the “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” of any person detained by the US government. That December, President George W. Bush grudgingly signed the bill into law. It should rightly have been called the Ian Fishback Act.
The same year, Time magazine’s annual list of the one hundred people most influential in transforming the world included then-captain Fishback and quoted a letter he had written to McCain: “I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is America.”
Not long thereafter, however, Ian’s personal and professional life began to unravel. An inability or refusal to compromise imposes burdens that can become unbearable.
Unaware of the demons that were afflicting him, Danny Sjursen and I invited him to contribute to this collection. He had demonstrated impressive moral courage at a moment when such courage had been in notably short supply: that’s what we wanted him to write about.
Ian accepted our invitation and eventually submitted an essay. It differed radically from what we had expected. The piece charged US government agencies with subjecting him to ongoing and relentless persecution of the most vicious sort, naming several very senior general officers as his chief tormentors. Yet the essay lacked the kind of specific detail needed to make it credible. Dates, places, Ian’s own actions in response—he provided none of these. Reluctantly, I deemed the piece unpublishable. When I notified Ian that we would not be using it, he did not reply.
I do not regret that decision. But with Ian’s passing, and knowing more about the travails of his recent years, I find myself haunted by two particular portions of the essay. In the first, Ian recalls being told by a senior officer at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, that “nothing sticks to people in the Beltway.” As that officer saw it, the military itself is innocent of blame: when bad things occur in distant war zones, it’s the politicians who are getting away with murder. Ian wrote that he found this buck-passing statement “extraordinarily dishonorable.”
Of course, the officer’s words were not entirely off the mark. Civilian leaders do demonstrate a remarkable aptitude for dodging responsibility when things go wrong. Yet in our era of very long and futile wars, nothing much sticks to senior military commanders either. Even today, the accountability that Ian Fishback sought in 2005 remains missing in action, as the lamentable conclusion of the Afghanistan War reminds us. The generals who presided over this massive failure have gotten away scot-free. In effect, they have conspired with the politicians to evade responsibility.
The other remarkable passage was the harsh judgment with which Ian concluded his essay. “America is not free,” he wrote, “and the Constitution is a model of American hypocrisy.” The gap between the bitter note of despair in that indictment and Ian’s prior professed willingness to sacrifice his life for the American idea brought me up short. To dismiss his charge as overwrought would be too simplistic. Ian has earned the right to be taken seriously.
In the modern era, all wars are alike in certain respects, but each has its own distinctive attributes. The terminology that recurs over and over again in America’s post-9/11 wars—improvised explosive devices, traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder—hints at some of the qualities of those conflicts. So, too, does the epidemic of suicides among serving soldiers and recent veterans. But of greater significance still is the persistent indifference of the American people.
This volume pulls back the veil on that collective indifference, allowing a diverse group of participants in those wars to reflect on all that has been lost and at what cost. The testimony of these military dissenters is of inestimable value. Like Ian Fishback, they deserve to be heard.