EPILOGUE

 

 

INFINITE JUSTICE

Bitter as hell on conduct of war.

—LIEUTENANT GENERAL JOSEPH W. STILWELL

 

 

IN THE DUSTY fields outside Iskandariyah, the Company C sniper team really did the job. Tipped off by local Iraqi farmers, the Americans had been watching the dirt road for hours. Sure enough, just after dawn on May 20, 2005, three young men cruised up in a battered gray Opel sedan. They stopped just short of an uneven patch of darkened, turned dirt—an old IED hole.

With binoculars, the spotter watched the three get out. The driver walked around the back and opened the trunk. It sprang up, wobbling. Camouflaged in the long grass of a hide site two hundred yards out, the Americans were too far away to hear anything much. Beside the soldier with the binoculars, the sniper adjusted his telescopic sight, barely breathing. He was taking a bead on the Iraqi driver.

As the trio stood behind the car, the first man reached into the trunk and wrestled out a big, earth-toned cylinder. It looked to be an artillery shell, probably a 152 mm, a big one. The Iraqi cradled it in both arms and passed it like a fat baby to his partner. That man accepted the burden, then turned slowly and began walking toward the hole.

The first man then pulled up another heavy artillery projectile. Deliberately, he swayed to face the third man, who stood with arms out, waiting. The driver handed off the thing. The person with the second shell faced toward the hole and walked unsteadily, clearly uncomfortable with the heft of the ninety-seven pounds of metal and explosives.

Both rounds on their way to the chosen spot, the driver then reached into the trunk and pulled up a coil of red rope. Russian detonating cord looked like cherry-colored clothesline, but it consisted of a fast-burning demolition. Wrapped around those 152 mm rounds, then tied to a trigger device—a pressure plate, for example—the red det cord made sure the thing would go up nicely. The sniper soldiers had seen enough.

The American with the rifle held his breath. In the crosshairs of the optical sight, the Iraqi with the red cord bobbed a bit, like a dinghy in prop wash. The sniper’s right index finger slowly squeezed the trigger.

Crack!

The Iraqi went down as if poleaxed. That supersonic one-inch 7.62 mm slug hit him in the head or neck—hard to be sure. But he wouldn’t be getting back up.

The other two Iraqis dropped their 152 mm shells as if the things were on fire. One began running down the road. The other, clearly confused, went back to the car, opened the door, crawled in, and scrunched down in the back seat, playing possum. Within minutes, a blocking squad from Company C’s First Platoon nabbed the runner. Another squad pulled the third man from the back of the Opel.

The squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Simril, put out the word to all 2–11 Cavalry troopers: “Yesterday, we sent a strong message to the insurgents trying to operate in our AO [area of operations]. Set up IEDs and we will hunt you down.”

For three days, hostile activity ceased along the farm roads north of FOB Kalsu. One good shot made a difference. But on the afternoon of May 23, on another dirt trail not far from where Company C’s snipers had nailed the Opel threesome, the insurgents evened it up.

Four Company C up-armored Humvees drove slowly down the slightly elevated road, long grass waving on either side. The thermometer stood at a hundred degrees, the horizon indistinct with heat haze as the turret gunners scanned their sectors, alert for untoward movements. No Iraqi farmers worked in the fields. It was just too hot this early afternoon.

The Mississippi Guardsmen liked being attached to Bill Simril’s aggressive squadron. These Cavalry troopers took the fight to the enemy, and that suited the riflemen of Company C. In the counter-IED fight, the squadron had killed or captured twenty hostile bomb emplacers in that warming month of May. Company C had gotten its share, with the recent sniper ambush a particularly proud achievement.

Then the road flashed white and it all went to black, a smashing, grinding, hammering, throaty crash, lightning and thunder at ground level, right here, right now. A massive dirt column vomited up, engulfing the third Humvee completely.

As the brown grit rained down and the savaged air cleared, the armored truck materialized, a ghostly outline wholly engulfed in flames. It was all burning, the turret, the tires, the tan-painted metal, and the Kevlar armor, a licking, roaring furnace. There were four soldiers in there, four Mississippi Guardsmen. But you couldn’t see them at all. Tongues of fire barred the way. Heat waves shimmered off the stricken Humvee. Oily black smoke boiled up, swirling around the scene, shrouding the horror.

The men on the other three trucks tried to get near it, to pull somebody out. The fierce heat and shooting flames drove them back. Then the onboard bullets began sparking off, strings of machine-gun rounds going off by tens, individual rifle bullets popping into the air at crazy angles. A grenade cooked off with a dull boom. The JP-8 fuel, formulated to burn rather than explode, fed the towering pyre.

A long, awful hour passed while the fiery twisted mass burned down. Thoroughly stripped of paint and additives, molten raw metal pooled into bright puddles on the dusty road. Charred chunks of tires and curled strips of plastic smoldered, belching up stinking tendrils of hot coal-black smoke.

By the time the heat at last began to subside, the 2–11 Cavalry’s quick-reaction platoon had arrived with medics and an armored wrecker truck, all led by Major Kevin Hendricks. They did what they could on the spot. It wasn’t enough.

Unable to complete the recovery of the four dead, wary of potential insurgents prowling in the distance, the Americans dragged the mangled truck back to FOB Kalsu. There, Hendricks, Company C Guardsmen, and other 2–11 Cavalry troopers labored for hours to extract the four Americans. Kevin Hendricks said later, “It took me four days to remove the smell from my hands.”

 

Four lives sacrificed—to what end? Great War veteran Wilfred Owen, before the Germans got him, wrote a verse starkly contrary to the beliefs of the ancient Romans, finding little dulce et decorum about dying in the cruel, searing grip of modern explosives. We dare not ask lightly for our soldiers and their families to endure such unspeakable agonies. Yet we did.

Almost as bad, maybe worse in the long run, what did we inflict on Major Kevin Hendricks? For the rest of his life, he’ll be trying to wash away what he saw, what he smelled, what he felt that horrific afternoon near Iskandariyah. No man is hard enough to walk away from that. How many others carry those everlasting stains? We know, but we don’t know. We don’t want to know.

What do we know? The war resulted in almost 7,000 Americans dead, five times that many wounded, and a much higher number dealing with psychiatric injuries great and small. Our Coalition allies sustained more than 1,300 dead and nearly 6,000 wounded. The Afghan people counted at least 13,000 civilian fatalities, although statistics there are notoriously unreliable. Iraqi dead, more accurately estimated in the face of much higher levels of violence, approached 104,000. In both countries, the lists of dead included a significant number of insurgents. Sorting it all out was just as hard in the morgue as it was on the battlefield.

The war also cost the U.S. a lot of money, almost a trillion dollars since September of 2001, about two-thirds for Iraq, the rest for Afghanistan. Just how much permanent damage this did to our country’s economy is hard to determine. War funding certainly elevated the federal government’s already burgeoning annual deficits and added a few more unwelcome strata to the accreting mountain of long-term national debt. Both political parties pointed accusing fingers even as the spending continued. By any measure, fighting a protracted war on the opposite side of the world with a volunteer military and a lot of expensive contractors is not cheap.

For all of this pain, what resulted? Pace Barack Obama’s May 2012 comments at Bagram Airfield, the al-Qaeda leadership has indeed been devastated. The organization that planned and executed the 1998 African embassy attacks, the USS Cole strike, and 9/11 no longer exists. Terror cells take the name and claim the heritage. But classic, centralized al-Qaeda has been crushed. Those who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, have been fully avenged.

Post-Saddam Iraq endures under the authoritarian rule of an unenlightened Shia clique that has long backed the likes of Nouri al-Maliki. Violence from marginalized Sunni Arabs has increased steadily, erupting in widespread antigovernment rebellions in the north and west in mid-2014. The United States maintains formal relations and helps out the Iraqi military, but at arm’s length. Iranian influence remains strong. Between the U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011 and whatever evil may come next, the decent interval continues for now. How long Iraq holds together remains to be seen.

Post-Taliban Afghanistan carries on, subject to the whims of the same entrenched self-serving Kabul circle that gave us Hamid Karzai. Out in the southern and eastern villages, the Taliban perseveres, biding its time, awaiting its opening. It may come, or it may not. Nobody can really be sure. America intends to draw down yet stay engaged, as does NATO, to help Afghanistan remain intact. Pakistan agrees at times, as long as that Afghan state stays weak and fractured and is no threat to the Islamabad government. What follows after 2014 may well revert to the tradition of millennia: squabbling tribes, random violence, and an occasional genuflection toward a figurehead in Kabul. And that’s the best case.

Out in other places, in remote reaches of Africa and Asia, the CIA, the SOF, and other allies persist in hunting America’s terrorist foes. At home, law enforcement entities strive to stay ahead of threats, acting under an expanded mandate and not without objection from citizens unhappy with the consequent intrusions on privacy and personal liberties. President George W. Bush warned that much of the war necessarily proceeded unseen, “covert operations, secret even in success.” President Barack Obama kept up the pressure and, indeed, increased it in many ways. As a result, the United States has suffered no major terror attacks since 9/11.

Those things were done, and continue to be done.

 

What wasn’t done?

Here a broad chasm gapes between what the United States accomplished and what it aspired to do in the wake of the 9/11 attack. In the immediate aftermath of the al-Qaeda assault, America wanted victory over Islamist terrorists writ large and suppression of their various hosts and enablers. The citizenry demanded a strong response. The U.S. Congress reflected that sentiment by granting broad authorities to retaliate against and, in time, to preempt al-Qaeda and its collaborators. A clutch of visionaries even advocated remaking the Middle East in America’s image: democratic, committed to the equality of women, valuing education, and embracing interaction with the global economy and free societies. Rhetoric soared.

In carrying out this effort, the country faced a choice. America might opt for decisive war through annihilation, as in World War II, or containment through limited conflict and attrition, as in the Cold War. The Bush administration favored the former but lacked a concentrated enemy power to crush. Al-Qaeda operated from Afghanistan but obviously spread well beyond the valleys of the Hindu Kush. Denied a single geographically distinct foe, Bush and his people rightly chose their path with care. Casting too broad a net risked war with multiple Islamist networks tied to a list of actively hosting and clearly tolerant countries, including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, not to mention Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Bush’s team lacked the stomach to wade into more than a billion Muslims, most of them not actively hostile. Containment had to suffice. Over time, defined as decades, a firm U.S. military stance coupled with economic and cultural penetration promised to erode Islamist roots, as it had once degraded Communist ideology. So went the thinking. The original code name Infinite Justice may have been discarded, but the logic behind it, and the timeline suggested, remains the U.S. strategy to this day.

Bush’s war began narrowly, knocking out al-Qaeda and its Taliban backers in Afghanistan. Within weeks of 9/11, the basic goals were fulfilled, not perfectly, not completely, but probably close enough. Had we stopped there and reverted to the long, slow Clinton-era squeeze of terror cells and Islamist supporters, it might have done the job. But after 9/11, in an America beset by rumors and fears, the gambit in Afghanistan, though impressive, did not seem to fill the bill. Other threats existed and demanded action.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq topped that list of known and presumed dangers. Already face to face with U.S. airpower every day, loudly championing terrorist groups, hammering his own people, and suspected of amassing chemical arms, Saddam seemed overdue for decisive American action. In retrospect, Saddam’s Iraq appears to have been contained and could conceivably have been boxed in more tightly rather than destroyed outright. But Saddam’s survivor’s luck ran out. Buoyed by quick success in Afghanistan, the United States chose to act, rapidly overwhelming the Baathist regime. Containment and limited conflict rang up another accomplishment.

Again, as after the fall of Kabul, the swift seizure of Baghdad offered another opportunity to close out the conventional military phase and go back to the slow, steady, daily pressures of global containment of Islamist threats. That moment passed. Instead, satisfaction in brilliant opening-round victories, initial popular acclaim in America, encouragement from many allies, and more than a little pride influenced Bush to try for more, way more. With minimal domestic debate—and, notably, no known military objection—the administration backed into two lengthy, indecisive counterinsurgency campaigns, Afghanistan underresourced, and Iraq overly optimistic. The limited ends of containing Islamist movements and attritting al-Qaeda faded into the background, at least until Sunni Arabs and a resurgent Taliban made it obvious that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan seemed likely to move readily into the orbit of Western democratic republics. By the decade’s end, chastened, bloodied, and weary, America returned to containment and limited operations.

We have been to this rodeo before. The same cycle played out early in the Cold War, when President Harry S. Truman, determined to contain Russian Communist influence, intervened on the Korean peninsula in 1950. After sobering early reverses, the brilliant Inchon invasion enveloped and largely destroyed the North Korean divisions, and the initially narrow task of defending South Korea became a great crusade to liberate the Communist north. Massive Chinese intervention compelled Truman to go back to the earlier, limited policy of protecting South Korea, half a loaf, but better than none. Still, the heady promises and then dashed hopes, coupled with the casualties incurred, the very public relief of imperious Douglas MacArthur, and what glum GI wags called “die for a tie,” torpedoed Truman’s domestic support, cratered his reputation, and led to the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower from the opposition party. Eisenhower quickly wrapped up the Korean armistice. During his tenure in office, the former general carefully avoided other proposed interventions except under the most strictly defined conditions.

You could see Bush as Truman, and Obama as Eisenhower, the former overreaching in misplaced good faith, the latter pulling back and strictly metering when and where the U.S. took action. As in the 1950s, the basic strategy made sense. But containment demanded patience and limits, the long game. It also required a U.S. commitment, restricted in numbers but undeniable, as Eisenhower provided in Korea, where America forces remain to this day. In that aspect, Barack Obama faltered, with consequences we have yet to see.

 

What went wrong?

It has become somewhat fashionable in the senior ranks of the military to point fingers at the civilian officials, elected and appointed, for mucking up the war. Civilian control of the military means the suits propose and the uniforms dispose. The Stan McChrystal Rolling Stone imbroglio aside, those on active duty almost always kept their opinions private when it came to dealing with the civilians. Yet the generals and admirals and, especially, the majors and sergeants were not stupid. They saw the war wasn’t working. Naturally, they attributed a share of that to two presidents and several secretaries of defense, among others. In their sarcastic exchanges, McChrystal’s men didn’t say anything that hadn’t been heard during the war inside combat outposts, aboard MRAP trucks and C-130 transports, and in various operations centers. By tradition and law, however, such critical comments rarely surfaced. One former Department of Defense appointee referred to the “silence of the generals.”

During the war, the top military officers gave their views to the civilian officials in confidence behind closed doors, disdaining the old Washington games of press leaks and background grousing. As for speaking up in public, well, it just didn’t happen. A serving senior commander who held a press conference or went before Congress and spoke his mind contrary to Bush or Obama administration views might be right, but he’d also be fired, a truth underlined by Stan McChrystal’s terminal brush with that overly zealous journalist. Even a misstep in a press interview, a loose phrase or a mistake, often resulted in a reprimand or, in some cases, removal. Dealing with news people amounted to handling live snakes—not much good came of it. So with the exception of adept Dave Petraeus and a few game if less sure-footed imitators, most generals avoided the news media or fed them pabulum, predigested talking points. Inside the headquarters, a few of those wearing stars sometimes complained that the ladies and gentlemen of the press were not team players, not patriots, and were overly invested in undermining the war effort. Ernie Pyle and Marguerite Higgins were definitely dead. The majority of generals saw it otherwise, noting that despite the fond hopes of some of the more activist writers and editors, the American news media provided a mirror, not a prism. If you didn’t like what you saw, it was because the truth hurt. It hurt a lot during this war.

If those on active duty stayed quiet, retired officers, Army generals in particular, did not. In 2006, for example, several prominent officers, including former Iraq war commanders Ric Sanchez, John Batiste, and Paul Eaton, excoriated Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for his purported unwillingness to heed military counsel. In 2013, Eaton, joined by other retired generals and anonymous serving senior officers, said similar things about the Obama administration. To read all of this, you’d think that the top suits were getting the right steerage, but not deigning to listen.

Yet all too often, the military offered advice hardly worth hearing. The man widely reputed to be the most capable and far-seeing secretary of defense during the war, Bob Gates, shared these rueful words with cadets at West Point: “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Wise words, certainly, but this same secretary oversaw not one, but two, troop surges that reinforced stalemated land campaigns in Asia. And who provided the “best military advice” that suggested such things?

Following the sodden, bloody purgatory of the Somme and Passchendaele, the British trench brotherhood who survived the horror show depicted by Wilfred Owen complained loudly about the failures of generals in command of the British Expeditionary Force on the western front. A common refrain referred to “an Army of lions led by donkeys,” baldly accusing the wartime leadership of unimaginative ignorance. It was a grossly unfair characterization then and absolutely untrue of the American generals of the present war. That granted, there is a mulish aspect at work.

 

Equity demands that we start with what went right in a military sense. Many things did, and these certainly redound to the credit of all ranks, from the generals on down. The senior leadership made some very prudent early calls. Moreover, in these areas, they adapted quickly as the war evolved. Recommendations on how to organize, train, and equip the U.S. Armed Forces, especially the hard-pressed ground services, made it all the way up and produced superb outcomes.

Strategic choices set the table for America to carry on a long war. Leaving aside the wisdom of the twin counterinsurgencies, the decision to mobilize the Guard and Reserve guaranteed support for the troops in every county in America. Guardsman George W. Bush in 2001, like Guardsman Harry S. Truman in 1950, grasped fully the strong ties between American communities and their citizen-soldiers. The war declined steadily in popularity, but public support for those fighting it did not.

A second strategic determination, closely aligned to the first, shaped the scale of the war. The United States allowed a relatively modest increase in the size of the regular Army and Marine Corps and made essentially no additions to the Navy and Air Force. When needed, substantial reinforcements came from Guard and Reserve unit call-ups. This accorded well with a long-term containment strategy and lowered the strain on American society.

The third strategic resolution flowed from the first two as well as from the upper uniformed ranks’ hard-won experience in Vietnam. The services chose to rotate forces by unit. With limited Guard and Reserve activations and caps on service end strengths, battalions made multiple trips into theater. Because they prepared, deployed, and returned as teams, they did so over and over effectively. In this, the United States validated the lessons learned by British and French regulars during centuries of overseas duties.

Key tactical ideas allowed U.S. units to perform with confidence under fire. As a rule, American weaponry, equipment, training, and small-unit leadership far outstripped anything arrayed against them. The joint aspects of intelligence, logistics, and especially airpower sent every American platoon of soldiers into action confident that they could slay their antagonists with impunity today, tonight, and as long as it took. The computers and other IT made shots count, as long as the Americans could find the enemy. As usual, therein lay the rub.

The SOF elements and all their clandestine relatives eventually developed superb skills in hunting down the enemy leadership. Those skills didn’t exist at the outset of the war, and they reached their fullest potential alongside conventional forces serving as beaters to stir up the prey, police up lesser targets, and finish off the cripples. Intelligence fusion, uniting human and technical means, reached its zenith in the Task Force. The line battalions never equaled that impressive standard, but they proved eager learners, and over time, the entire force improved a great deal. Though this achievement was clearly a labor of many, the vision of General Stan McChrystal drove the train. He and his fellow SOF commanders instilled a man-hunting prowess that continues to terrorize the terrorists in all the dark corners of the globe.

Discrete focus on enemy chieftains, carried out by IT-enabled smart munitions, allowed U.S. forces to severely restrict the use of firepower. Outside of the opening invasions and occasional major pushes like Fallujah, American forces did not overdo the use of artillery and close air support. The record of both campaigns does not feature many cases of towns destroyed in order to save them, in that grimly memorable phrase reported by Peter Arnett in Vietnam. Modern weapons do create a lot of damage, so even “precision” strikes are anything but safe for those nearby. Given an opponent fully intertwined with the population, Americans relied on old-fashioned foot patrolling and house raids more often than not. Protecting the people was always part of the calculus.

Protecting our own forces came harder, especially in light of the enemy’s reliance on IEDs, without doubt its weapon of choice. America began the war willing to ride out or avoid roadside bombs, mines, and booby traps. Early in the war, the entire wheeled-vehicle fleet proved unable to shrug off a determined pistol shooter, let alone absorb the effects of massive, buried racks of artillery shells. Losses incurred during the first months of fighting demanded a better solution, and fast. Within months after the Iraq campaign began, American industry fielded an entire new set of up-armored Humvees and affiliated cargo trucks. Then the factories trumped that achievement by producing thousands of V-hull MRAPs in the second half of the war. In addition, to clear key routes, the military organized dedicated IED location-and-clearance elements. These brought together specially trained soldiers, unique equipment, and purpose-built demolitions to find and clear IEDs. These concentrated exertions paid off. With each passing year, though the enemy used more and more IEDs, the things became less and less effective in harming Americans and their allies. In future conflicts, America’s enemies will surely use IEDs. The U.S. now has the wherewithal to meet that challenge.

We taught these methods to others. Working under fire and on the clock, America helped Iraq and Afghanistan recruit, organize, train, and equip adequate forces, and then use them on operations. Although some allies taught but did not accompany the Iraqis and Afghans, the U.S. did both. “Do as I do” and leading by example are always the most useful means of advisory work, especially given the acknowledged language barriers. Both Iraqis and Afghans fought effectively alongside their American teammates. With the American advisers gone, the real test will begin. Early returns from Iraq are not encouraging. The results in Afghanistan may well be equally uneven. We shall see.

The wholesale training of two nascent foreign militaries during a war says much about the quality and rigor of U.S. military training. In all services, the United States superbly prepared individuals, leaders, and units for war. Time after time, following a firefight, an American soldier or Marine offered that the event turned out to be just like training. Effective training takes time and money, and as the war continued, all the services optimized to fight insurgents. So they all focused on the critical tasks and drilled them hard. This ensured success in thousands of short, sharp engagements and endurance in dozens of longer, bloodier clashes. Training glued it all together. It gave men and women confidence under fire.

Tough training underwrote a personal bond tested in many firefights. The Army’s warrior ethos, derived from the Ranger Creed, put it best: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” Men and women fight as they are trained. Throughout the combat that followed 9/11, the U.S. military stressed that units bring everybody out of the crucible, every time. Some may be hurt, and some may die—the enemy shot back—but in this war, Americans recovered their casualties. This was a very demanding standard, especially given thousands of small units on foot day and night in brutal terrain, extreme weather, and hostile fire. But Americans did it. When the Iraq campaign ended, all uniformed casualties had been recovered. In Afghanistan, the same ethos applied. This blood oath to bring everyone home does a lot to explain why, despite an increasingly unpopular war, young volunteers kept joining up and reenlisting.

The skill and will to close with the enemy made a difference from the start. Placed in contact with their adversaries, Americans almost always prevailed. It was an absolute and very dearly won strength. In it, though, dwelt a risk, the one Robert E. Lee lamented in the aftermath of the disastrous repulse on the third day at Gettysburg: “It’s all my fault. I thought my men were invincible.”

 

Above that tactical excellence yawned a howling waste. The civilians provided an adequate containment strategy. The U.S. Armed Forces, led by its admirals and generals, fielded capable, resilient combat units. With few exceptions, small U.S. units proved lethal to their opponents. A gaggle of one-sided firefights, however, do not victory make, especially against guerrilla enemies.

The war required a way to use a tactically superb force to contain and attrit terrorist adversaries. In this, America’s generals failed. We found ourselves impaled and bogged down in not one, but two Middle Eastern countries, and this on the best military advice of educated, experienced senior military men and women who had all studied Vietnam in their service schools. Over time, piece by piece, the generals recommended slogging onward, taking on two unlimited irregular conflicts with limited forces. Absent a realistic campaign concept in both countries, wars of attrition developed.

Some saw it as a failure of imagination. Frustrated subordinates and concerned fellow citizens complained that the generals didn’t get it. With most senior officers close-mouthed in front of visitors from Congress, inquisitive journalists, and various think-tank gadflies—few with any days in uniform—it became easy to consider the typically taciturn generals narrow-minded, ill-read, or just plain dumb. That kind of impression was off the mark. But in the absence of contrary evidence, it persisted among interested foreign policy and defense intellectuals and others who saw themselves that way, thinkers inclined to grope for the proper clever idea to rescue a floundering war.

Along these lines, many voices, including a large number in uniform, advocated an earlier, formal adoption of a wide range of counterinsurgency practices. These had some value, and most, if not all, eventually got used in both countries. The shiny objects of counterinsurgency theory, neatly captured in FM 3–24, ended up delivering far less than expected or hoped. Counterinsurgency works if the intervening country demonstrates the will to remain forever. That applies in colonies and territorial annexations with the supervising power in full control. And even then, it doesn’t always work, as France learned the hard way in Indochina and then Algeria. Once it becomes clear that the external forces won’t stay past a certain date, the guerrillas simply back off and wait it out. Had America treated Afghanistan and Iraq from the beginning as the future fifty-first and fifty-second states, FM 3–24 offered a way to pacify them. Saddled with incomplete authority over Afghan and Iraqi internal affairs, inept host governments, and ticking clocks, we could not do it. By the time the manual came out, the techniques had already been tried and found wanting.

A sensible look at American military strengths in 2001 showed a clear alternative to grinding counterinsurgency campaigns. As a joint force and as individual services, the U.S. military recognized the value of short, decisive conventional conflicts waged for limited ends: Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Bosnia in 1995, and Kosovo in 1999. Force composition and training reflected this short-war bias. Employed thusly, American airpower and SOF in Afghanistan in 2001, and airpower and armor in Iraq in 2003, worked as advertised.

Had that ended our efforts, we would have been fighting well within our means. Admiring war colleges would have studied the brilliant opening rounds as models of lightning war. But here success undid us. Rightly impressed by the innovation and speed of the initial attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq and thoroughly convinced of the quality of our volunteer troops, successive generals in command at the four-, three-, and two-star levels signed on for more, a lot more, month by month, then year by year. In so doing, we did not heed Sun Tzu’s caution. We did not understand our enemies. Indeed, drawn into nasty local feuds, we took on too many diverse foes, sometimes confusing opponents with supporters and vice versa. Then we compounded that ignorance by misusing our conventionally trained military to comb through hostile villages looking for insurgents. Once it became evident that we would not stay, something we knew in Iraq by 2008 and in Afghanistan by 2011, we continued to press on and lose people in the vain hope that something might somehow improve. Our foes waited us out.

Many generals, including some at the very top, saw this problem as it developed. They shared their views, both inside the military and with civilian leaders. In 2003, Tommy Franks and Jack Keane thought we should back out of Afghanistan and Iraq and expected to do so, but neither pressed the case very hard. That same year, John Abizaid warned of a growing insurgency in Iraq, and by 2004 he joined George Casey to warn that at best, America could buy time for the Iraqis to win their own war. They assumed the Bush administration understood that this would be an effort of decades. They assumed wrongly. Successor commanders in both theaters—Petraeus, Odierno, McChrystal, Allen, Dunford—made equally poor assumptions that, despite every indication to the contrary, the Obama administration would commit to major long-term U.S. troop deployments. Somehow, on this most vital issue of all, during hundreds of hours of meetings, the uniforms and the suits managed to talk past each other. Sergeants and captains, not to mention our fellow citizens, count on generals to sort out such fundamental strategy. We didn’t.

It’s noteworthy that in the 2006 surge decision, President Bush overruled all of his senior field commanders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who urged him to limit the American effort, not escalate. In the 2009 surge decision, President Obama sought recommendations from all the top admirals and generals, then made up his mind and ordered a different solution than the one the military wanted. In these two prominent cases, and many others, senior military voices were definitely heard. But we need to be clear. Limits, curbs, and reductions came up. But simply cutting our losses and pulling out did not. The record to date shows that no senior officers argued for withdrawal. Instead, like Lee at Gettysburg, overly impressed by demonstrated U.S. military capabilities and our superb volunteers, commander after commander, generals up and down the chain, kept right on going. We trusted our invincible men and women to figure it out and rebuild two shattered Muslim countries, and do so under fire from enraged locals.

Once we’d gone down that bad road, our options shrank: Stay the course. Add forces. Pull out. Over time, in both countries, all three approaches were tried. Only the third one, pulling out, worked, and that in the finite sense that it ended U.S. involvement. But it left both friends and foes behind, sowing the seeds for future troubles.

Campaigning with an account ledger, narrowly focused on adding or subtracting forces, aligned well with the way the Joint Chiefs and services did business. They provide resources to forward commanders. Having missed the bus on limiting the campaigns in the early months, once stuck in the morass, all the Pentagon leadership could do was hang in there, send more, or pull the plug. It’s noteworthy that the one truly bold new idea—the Iraq surge—originated with retired general Jack Keane, not from among serving senior officers. Yet we shouldn’t overstate the value of that effort. The 2007 surge did not save the Iraq campaign. It was too late for that. But it gave America space to withdraw on its own terms and provided Iraq, however ungrateful, a chance to chart a course as a responsible nation-state.

The 2010 surge in Afghanistan achieved less. In a lot of ways, it reflected the near bankruptcy of military planning by that point. As the old joke goes, when all you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Military options presented to President Obama included some, more, or even more (enough, according to the senior officers) reinforcing troops. More hammer. His vice president, not a commanding general or service chief, offered an alternative counterterrorism concept. Having seen the scenario play out in Iraq and uncertain if it would work at all in Afghanistan, Obama surged, but with a crucial caveat: The military had until 2011 to do what it could with the extra forces. The Afghan surge blocked the Taliban and rolled them back a good bit. But in the end, the U.S. chose to get out.

Despite the unmatched courage of those in U.S. uniform—including a good number of generals who led their people under fire—our generals did not stumble due to a lack of intellect. Rather, we faltered due to a distinct lack of humility. Certain we knew best, confident our skilled troops would prevail, we persisted in a failed course for far too long and came up well short, to the detriment of our trusting countrymen.

 

The United States of America has already pressed past the Global War on Terrorism. As combat continued in Afghanistan, and the shadow of war went on across a wide range of distant hellholes, the Obama administration formally moved on. On November 17, 2011, in an address to the Australian Parliament regarding American interests in the Pacific Ocean and its littorals, the president promised that “the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future.” The speech signaled a major shift in American strategy, a conscious “pivot to Asia.” Although Obama and his key cabinet secretaries avoided the issue, and in some cases even denied it, this latest incarnation of the favored U.S. containment strategy had a new object, which of course was an old object, one Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson would have recognized. The Chinese government recognized it immediately, protestations from Washington notwithstanding.

Military consequences followed. Confronting nuclear-armed China and its massive army would be done by Air-Sea Battle, pitting American strengths against the competitor’s known and assumed weaknesses. That Land was missing from that title wasn’t an oversight. Having had a go at numerous Chinese Communist divisions in Korea from 1950 to 1953, and with no common land boundary to defend—unlike America’s NATO role in West Germany during the Cold War—the United States chose not to use ground units, except perhaps to secure islands or hold key coastal bases. That sure sounded like Marine work, maybe SOF or paratroopers. But it didn’t demand legions of tanks and soldiers.

With little need for ground forces in Air-Sea Battle and little interest in committing them elsewhere, the Department of Defense in its January 2012 strategic review delineated the future in no uncertain terms: “However, U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.” Translated, that meant no more counterinsurgencies with thousands of conventional troops. If the operations could be done on the cheap with a few hundred Special Forces, maybe. But mostly, forget it. What Army remained would prepare for the next Desert Storm, although against whom looked fuzzy, for sure. To pay for all of this Air-Sea Battle stuff, cuts in ground forces planned to reduce the regular Army from 570,000 to at least 450,000, probably much lower. The Marines also shed strength, but not as much, as their amphibious nature gave them a major role in the new Pacific strategy. The Air Force and Navy stood pat with some adjustments. It was back to the future, Eisenhower’s New Look after Korea or the Nixon Doctrine in the wake of Vietnam. Win the war from the air and sea. How Americans wanted that to be so, then, now, and seemingly ad infinitum. Left unsaid was the ugly truth that if you want to put your boot on an enemy’s neck, it has to be attached to a soldier’s foot.

With new marching orders, the U.S. Armed Forces began to retool even as the last months played out in Afghanistan. Good as it was—and it was tremendous—all of the thorough preparation for the 9/11 war meant that over time, everything revolved around finding and killing three guys with an RPG launcher. The Air Force deemphasized air-defense suppression and air-to-air tasks in favor of dropping JDAMs and making low passes to spook the guerrillas. The Navy spent less time on antisubmarine and anti-mine missions and more on shooting Tomahawk cruise missiles and generating carrier airstrikes. The Army lost touch with major combined-arms armored tactics and the ability to mass the fires of dozens of tubes of artillery on a single target but grew all too familiar with raiding houses and digging up IEDs. The Marine Corps has done precious few amphibious landings as they struggled to control unruly villages in two landlocked areas of operation. By 2011, as the Iraq conflict ended, American forces might have been hard-pressed to re-create the decisive opening offensive of March 2003. Developing the skills to carry out Air-Sea Battle will not come overnight.

As the United States military returns focus to its core strength, rapid, decisive conventional operations, it must come to grips with the war fought since 2001. Good ideas and bad, lessons learned, relearned, and unlearned, all deserve thorough scrutiny and discussion. In the 1970s and 1980s, following the end in Vietnam, the American military took a very uncompromising look at itself. The wartime generals had passed on, many of them unable or unwilling to see the flaws in the institution they had built. Those who fixed it were the younger leaders in Vietnam, Chuck Horner and Ron Fogleman of the Air Force, Norm Schwarzkopf and Gordon Sullivan of the Army, Leighton “Snuffy” Smith and Jay Johnson of the Navy, and Al Gray and Carl Mundy of the Marine Corps, among many, many, many other NCOs and officers of all ranks. Today, similar work is under way. The colonels have started it, but the younger men and women, ennobled by the war and scarred by the war, will bring it to fruition. They, not today’s generals, will figure it out.

As we look back on this long war, we must be frank about our shortcomings. That said, we must also remain alert to the possibilities—and even the hope—the future holds. One of the features of such conflicts involves their indeterminate outcomes. It takes decades to be sure. Today, having risen from devastation in 1953, the Republic of Korea is a vibrant economic miracle, a strong democracy that stands as one of America’s staunchest allies. More surprisingly, America also enjoys steadily improving relations, including military ties, with its implacable foe of 1965–75, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Perhaps some long-term good may arise from the river valleys of Mesopotamia or the lower slopes of the Hindu Kush. It’s still possible, a final irony atop so many others that have defined this hard war.