The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the U.S. Military

CONTENTS

Preface: The Collapse

Introduction: Breaking the Myth

Chapter 1: The Origins of the Separate World

Chapter 2: Unfounded Hubris

Chapter 3: Conformity and Cronyism—One and the Same

Chapter 4: Supreme Values—How Loyalty Creates Dishonesty

Chapter 5: A Culture of Silence—Censorship and Retaliation

Chapter 6: Criminality, Abuse, and Corruption

Chapter 7: Violence, Torture, and War Crimes

Conclusion: The Consequences of Separation

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

A Note on the Author

PREFACE

The Collapse

On the final evening of the academic year at West Point, the computer system collapsed. This incident, in May 2019—the third such breakdown in just over two months—came hours before the last day of classes at what the U.S. Army calls the preeminent leadership institution in the world, and was accompanied by a complete loss of internet connections. The army colonel responsible for the system admitted at the time that the shutdown had a crippling impact on cadets, though he managed to skirt all responsibility. It was a failure on his watch, and entirely not his fault.

In some ways, he was correct. The failure of that system was not his doing inasmuch as the failure of the entire system was not. His denial of responsibility was a sign of the large creeping problem inside America’s military and the schools that feed it. Breakdowns and malfunctions with far greater ramifications had been rampant long before the colonel became the chief information officer, and even before he was a student in the same place, decades earlier.

The colonel attributed the system outages to management, process, and technology failures [and] clumsy maintenance by the Pentagon’s Defense Research and Engineering Network (the DREN), the greater computer system that supports research and development for the entire U.S. military. After shifting and dispersing blame instead of accepting it, the colonel repeated another dubious and grandiose army mantra, reminding some in the West Point community, We are and will remain the #1 public university in the United States.

This kind of hubris in the face of inarguable failure is neither rare here nor mysterious. It is central to military officers’ bearing, as they try to project an image of competence, surety, and expertise, optimism over logic. The bragging, however, is not a harmless hooah, the guttural cheer uttered by soldiers to express their camaraderie and enthusiasm. Inside the U.S. military, such mantras and public relations adages can metastasize into falsity that may be used to justify interventions and wars, including those in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The geopolitical consequences of those wars could not be more significant. Communist, totalitarian North Korea possesses atomic weapons. Communist China fought the Americans on behalf of the North Koreans and supported the North Vietnamese, and China is now the second most influential nation in the world. Vietnam is completely Communist. Afghanistan’s sovereignty is threatened daily by the Taliban. Iraqi society, heavily influenced by Iran, which is another potential atomic threat, is in turmoil. Arising from the war in Iraq, ISIS is an international threat, including in Afghanistan. The Middle East is more dangerous than when the United States invaded Iraq under false pretenses in 2003. No one knows for sure, but probably three to six million people were killed in these wars, including over one hundred thousand U.S. soldiers. Inside America, the last seventy-five years of military intervention have unleashed a flood of incompetence, hubris, and denial.

I have been living at the headwaters.

West Point has graduated just about every top general in every war since 1861. It has been and remains one of the most critical institutions in America. Now completing my twentieth year teaching there, I’ve had a front-row seat to a culture that has led to great losses. I’ve observed how the thinking and behavior taught at West Point, mirrored in the other academies, overwhelmingly influences military culture at large and contributes to or creates catastrophes thousands of miles away.

The variables that lead to the military’s failure are numerous and complex, but lack of support is surely not one of them. Public polling regularly shows that the military is overwhelmingly the most popular institution in America. It is the most well resourced, technologically advanced, and highly weaponized force in world history. These immense advantages are a product of America’s democracy, economy, and system of taxation. What America creates, builds, and achieves becomes what its military should be able to create, build, and achieve. Why does it lose?

Along the way, the military, of its own volition, has separated from the civilian society that was supposed to be overseeing it and caused the nation irreparable damage. This separation has occurred slowly, but unabated, since the end of World War II, which, not coincidentally, was the military’s last clear-cut victory. The public’s deference toward America’s perceived military prowess solidified in 1945 and, despite seventy-five years of losses, has hardened into place. Under the watch of an executive branch that has ceded more and more authority to military generals—who now on their own often decide whom to attack around the world—and a Congress united by little except the fear of challenging war, the U.S. military has become an island. It has completely severed its culture, mores, and legal system from the basic tenets of civilian society and constitutional government.

After winning several critical Supreme Court cases in the 1970s and 1980s, the military successfully codified this separation into law. The highest court in the land deferred to the generals’ contention that they needed more leeway to create good order and discipline. As a result, legal and moral authority was delegated to the military chain of command, essentially depriving soldiers of constitutional liberties enjoyed by all U.S. citizens. The institution tasked with defending our freedoms was no longer required to offer these liberties. Within this insular world, unaccountable to outside authority, the U.S. military developed one value that eats away at all others: loyalty.

The military’s disassociation from civilian society has led to an institution that is larger and more independent than some nations, a sovereign entity within America, opaque and secretive. It is led by self-protective officers who can go decades without ever having to reckon with a contrary opinion. Conformity is not only valued but also treated as an end in itself. As in an authoritarian state, free speech, independent thought, and creativity are stifled and smothered. The individual gains nothing and risks everything by engaging in dissent. Compliance equals survival.

In this closed system, the generals do not develop the ingenuity necessary to win modern wars or the capacity to understand whether a war is even winnable in the first place. This leads to a consideration that is almost too disturbing to acknowledge: some generals may indeed understand but remain silent because there is no mechanism in the military for them to express their individual ideas or opinions. Men and women die because other men and women do not have the reasoning, or the ability, or the courage to speak truthfully.

Of course, a computer meltdown at a military academy is not a failed foreign intervention, but it does illustrate a military institution more focused on large machinery than on computer hardware and software, which are the modern tools that will determine success or failure in war. Along with an absence of adequate ingenuity, the conditions for individual and organizational failure are pervasive inside the military: loyalty over truth; isolation; censorship; control over everyone; manipulation of the media; narcissism; retaliation; and callousness. The military’s separation reinforces its worst instincts, especially its penchant for violence. This is a grave matter, and it is present every day at the three military academies. Statistics from studies by the Pentagon and Department of Justice show that women students attending the academies are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted than women students attending other colleges in the United States. The moderating influences and voices of reason that are inescapable in civilian society don’t make their way inside the academies.

In a place where loyalty is the top value, change is almost scientifically impossible. In any number of instances over the past two decades, I experienced the futility of relying on the most well educated officers in the military when urging basic modern practices. Civilian professors and I proposed that West Point should permit all faculty members, rather than exclusively army officers, to apply for academic leadership positions at West Point. This was rejected. Another time, I argued against what I believed was favoritism, a prohibited practice under federal law. This was met by immediate retaliation, a common response inside the military. I notified the top two officials in the U.S. Army, the civilian secretary of the army and the chief of staff, a four-star general, about conditions at West Point.

According to the federal agency where I litigated and won a case against the army, it was the head of the Department of Law, a colonel and military lawyer, who was responsible for the retaliation. From this case, I became a legally recognized whistleblower working under a corrective order issued by a federal administrative judge to West Point. When the army promoted the colonel to brigadier general, it was only the latest example of what I’ve come to expect from the world’s preeminent leadership institution. It is a malfunctioning system, and the consequences are the most dire imaginable.

The cost of loyalty is far too high, and we, for the safety of our nation, have to pay the bill that has come due.

INTRODUCTION

Breaking the Myth

Americans’ love for the military is embedded in their collective identity, as much a part of who they are as their affection for football, big cars, and fast food. Many are convinced of the military’s invincibility and that men and women in uniform personify the highest ideals of service and honor. Remarking on the catastrophic U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, journalist George Packer wrote, Like the President, [Vice President] Cheney maintained an almost mystical confidence in American military power and an utter incuriosity about the details of its human consequences.¹ Despite the public’s unceasing adulation, there is one overarching consideration that shadows the military’s seeming strength and reliability: it has not won a war in seventy-five years.

That the U.S. military is the best and most moral fighting force in history is embedded in the American psyche. In the Atlantic, James Fallows characterized this kind of idealization as overblown, limitless praise, absent the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other American institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money.² Politicians fight to one-up each other in flattery for the military, and the armed forces’ unquestioned reputation for near omnipotence is enjoyed by generals despite great military losses. Dissenters who harbor doubt or speak against the prevailing perception are so maligned that staying quiet seems the wiser position.

One simply has to observe weekend pastimes to spot rituals that are akin to worship. Sporting events, particularly football games, are soaked in military symbolism, as though the gladiators on the field should personify the courage and aggressiveness of armed servicemen and women. Military power is fetishized before the games with the unfurling of giant flags and flyovers by airborne weapons of war, displays that became more firmly entrenched after the September 11 attacks. The spectacles have been recently revealed to be initiated by the military itself. The Pentagon signed seventy-two contracts with professional sports teams and spent $6.8 million to support patriotic displays of the teams, according to a Senate report, which condemned the practice as paid patriotism.³

Though the Pentagon will not disclose how much it spends to influence opinions at home and abroad, the Associated Press found that the Department of Defense spent at least $4.7 billion that year [2009] on a mix of public relations and propaganda campaigns.⁴ In one year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising, and public relations—almost as many as the total 30,000 person workforce in the State department.⁵ Public spectacles are part of the U.S. military’s recruitment infrastructure, a behemoth that obscures and romanticizes the violence of war.

With eight hundred bases in seventy countries and territories throughout the world (what former naval officer and author Chalmers Johnson pointedly called America’s new colonies⁶) and always with over a million active-duty soldiers under arms, the U.S. military is the most widely dispersed and highly funded fighting force in history.⁷ The military receives over 20 percent of every dollar the U.S. government spends.⁸ The president’s proposed 2020 military budget was $750 billion, up from $639 just two years earlier⁹ and equal to that of the next fourteen countries combined.¹⁰ The projected defense-related funding for 2021 stretches to $956.7 billion.¹¹

With the military in possession of such enormous resources and staffed by highly trained soldiers, airmen, marines, and sailors, one critical question remains unanswered. Why does the American military keep losing wars? (A common definition of a war is that it is an international or civil conflict causing at least one thousand deaths yearly.¹²) A broad answer is that the U.S. military is deficient or broken. Against the North Koreans, who fought in mountainous terrain, or rural tribal fighters like the Vietcong, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS, who possessed only small weapons, America’s grand total of victories is zero. In truth, former army colonel and conservative author Andrew Bacevich writes in Breach of Trust, since 1945 the U.S. Army has not achieved anything approximating victory in any contest larger than policing exercises.¹³

One could argue that the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were difficult to win, or that the definition of winning is subjective or malleable. But if the generals believed the wars could not be won and remained silent, then they are complicit in America’s failures. If the generals believed the wars were winnable, but they could not achieve victory, then they lacked the ability to outfight and outwit their enemies. Either circumstance is a colossal problem for America.

THE BALANCE SHEET

Clear victory was once the norm for America. Through World War II, the nation fought wars to obtain territory and defend itself, which included the protection of Europe. Its enemies were identifiable nations that could be overcome by superior numbers of soldiers, utilization of natural resources, or scientific and industrial ingenuity.

From the Revolutionary War through the German and Japanese surrenders in 1945, America possessed unrivaled resources—productive land protected by oceans; a strong economy; a populous nation through immigration; and democratic and constitutional decision-making. American resourcefulness spurred unmatched educational, economic, and industrial production. America’s soft power—media, universities, technology, capitalism, and openness—more than military might, contributed to the end of the Cold War, which is enormously revealing. That the Cold War with the Soviet Union was never fought conventionally—military to military—is a likely reason that the United States won.

Meanwhile, the hot wars that the United States has fought in the last seventy-five years almost all fall into the category of civil war, virtually the only kind of war remaining on the planet. If not for the world’s civil wars, war could be on the verge of ceasing to exist as a substantial phenomenon, according to political science professor John Mueller.¹⁴ After 1945, fighting in civil wars and ideological conflicts, which last longer than conventional wars and may be less likely to result in a settlement, became the American military’s modus operandi.¹⁵ The American rationale for war was to stop the spread of communism and, later, terrorism. Confident in the rightness of its own ideology, the United States waded into or invaded the Korean peninsula, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq—with disastrous results.

Even assuming that those wars were winnable—a big assumption—the generals needed to create novel strategies and adapt to the complex political structures that developed after World War II. This did not occur. The U.S. military … has traditionally resisted adapting itself to stabilizing missions, preferring to plan for reruns of World War II, writes political science professor Dominic Tierney in How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War.¹⁶

The problem was not only a lack of adaptation. It was—and continues to be—an inability or lack of desire to face a reality that may require adaptation. Historian John W. Dower writes that after Vietnam the elite military academies that trained career officers actually expunged counterinsurgency from their regular curricula.¹⁷ Similarly, Professor Tierney notes that the army’s 1976 training manual incredibly … didn’t even mention counterinsurgency—even though the United States had just lost more than fifty thousand men battling insurgents for eight years in Vietnam. As if saying the name of the guerilla bogeyman might summon it again.¹⁸ Former vice chief of staff for the army and retired general Jack Keane admitted, After the Vietnam War, we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency, because it had to do with how we lost that war. In hindsight, that was a bad decision.¹⁹

This is beyond an understatement. It is also one of the clearest representations of the monumental problem at hand. The U.S. military fights the wars it knows and wants to be fighting (some version of World War II), not what’s on the ground—other countries’ civil wars. The adversaries in civil wars are often motivated by ethnic, religious, tribal, or ideological identity, which may be more powerful motivators than nationalism. They fight on familiar terrain, in mountains, jungles, and valleys near their homes. They manufacture, purchase, or rig weaponry to fit their narrow circumstances. To judge by the record of the past twenty years, Bacevich writes, U.S. forces win decisively only when the enemy obligingly fight on American terms.²⁰

None of America’s recent enemies has been doing us this favor. As Dower points out, the war on terror, launched in 2001 and ongoing still, is almost antithetical to the high-tech, smart-weapon, rapid-deployment, small-footprint, in-and-out war [former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld] and a legion of erstwhile defense experts in Washington had envisioned.²¹ The U.S. military commissioned relatively generic weapons, for example, tanks with turrets that do not swoop low or high enough to counter insurgents who live and fight on undulating terrain.

Speaking at West Point in November 2018, two U.S. Army captains who were company commanders during the Battle of Mosul (Iraq) in 2017 described how old thinking and expensive weapons cannot win the day. They explained how waiting seven years for the U.S. Army and Pentagon to produce weapons and strategies to fight ISIS in Iraq was a losing proposition. In the dense urban environment of Mosul, population 600,000, a city reminiscent of antiquity, ISIS thugs, one of the captains said, held the city for two years by dint of their ingenuity. The civilization surrounding Mosul dates to 2500 B.C.E., and the city today contains up to seven layers of old catacombs. Two or three ISIS snipers running back and forth through the catacombs and firing intermittently created the impression of a much larger force. Within the city, ISIS soldiers launched mortars from inside houses by cutting holes in the roofs and shuttering the holes after launch. Iraqi and U.S. soldiers could not locate the houses for days, by which time ISIS was gone.

On March 17, 2017, the United States dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb on a concrete building in a densely populated part of Mosul in an attempt to kill two ISIS snipers. For lack of intelligence and situational awareness, the Americans were unaware that over a hundred Iraqi civilians had taken refuge within the structure, almost all of whom were killed when the U.S. bomb ignited ISIS munitions. The final death toll might have been 141, because additional missing civilians were never found. The New York Times reported that a U.S. general said it was possible civilians had been held in the building (which one of the captains at West Point also said), though there was no proof of that, according to the Times.²²

When the Iraqi soldiers moved toward Mosul, ISIS, using swarms of commercial drones, quadcopters bought off the shelf, would hover the drones over soldiers and bomb them with jerry-rigged grenades. One captain observed that U.S. fighter planes were useless against the tiny drones. Because the Iraqi and American soldiers did not foresee the drone attacks and did not have assets (missiles or electromagnetic) to shoot down the drones, ISIS controlled the airspace below 2,000 feet.

While these captains described the tactical conditions of war, American military leaders since World War II have been also unfamiliar with geographic, cultural, political, and social conditions in the regions where troops have fought. In modern wars, the generals have had to rely more on their intellect and less on weaponry, and they’ve been outgunned by their adversaries. The most critical reason for failure is the decline in the performance of U.S. military officers since World War II. Andrew Bacevich described broadly the most recent collapse of commanders in The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism: The quality of American generalship since the end of the Cold War has seldom risen above the mediocre … This is one of the dirty little secrets to which the world’s only super power has yet to own up. As the United States has come to rely ever more heavily on armed force to prop up its position of global preeminence, the quality of senior American military leadership has been consistently disappointing … First-rate generalship has been hard to come by.²³

More specifically, in a 2017 book-length study, three social scientists on the faculty at West Point detailed for the Army War College the intellectual decline among the officers of the army over the past one hundred years, and the utter collapse since the end of World War II. Ominously, they found that political, social, and cultural influences will prevent America from finding better officers any time soon. Army officers, according to the scientists, used to come from a somewhat representative sample of Americans, from big and small towns and different social and cultural backgrounds. This changed as military service became less desirable and as the army deemphasized intellectual testing and individual performance in favor of malleable metrics that can be manipulated, like the whole person score used by West Point to admit at risk students. In short, the scientists concluded, contrary to popular opinion and scholarly assertion, the rigor of the Army’s intellectual selection instruments has deteriorated over the last century … [and] the trend has been toward declining standards and declining (relative) scores … This difficult [operational] environment will require future Army officers to perform at a higher intellectual level than they presently do.²⁴ The scientists found that this trend of deteriorating mental standards led the army to abandon its attempt to retain officers with abundant intelligence because they refused to stay in the army, and that motivation replaced intelligence as the most important consideration in officer selection.²⁵ The officers leading the military today appear not to have the ability to win modern wars, and almost nobody knows it.

KOREA

The results of the last four wars since 1945 should lead Americans to reassess their faith in military leaders. Those wars, in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, illustrate recurring approaches that have led to failure. The operation called Desert Storm, in January and February of 1991, when the U.S. and thirty-eight allied nations expelled Iraq from Kuwait in a ground war lasting about one hundred hours, is not included in this evaluation because it was not a war under one common definition (one thousand dead yearly). This was certainly treated as a victory at the time. But hindsight has revealed a more nuanced picture. After the war, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president, slaughtered the Shiites and Kurds. His Republican Guard retained power. The U.S.-incited rebellion against Saddam failed. Shiites and Kurds in Iraq never forgot this, and they carried their anger and distrust with them in 2003 and onward when America needed their help. The lasting legacy of Desert Storm was that the civilian population couldn’t trust America, a condition that contributed to the military’s failure in Iraq after the U.S. invaded in 2003.

The Korean War, according to journalist Neil Sheehan, was the first war in American history in which the leaders of the Army and the nation were so divorced from reality and so grossly underestimated their opponent that they brought disaster to the Army and the nation.²⁶ In the wake of World War II, the Korean peninsula had become a dangerous laboratory in which the dueling ideologies of communism and democracy contended. The North developed into a Communist state, while the South adopted western ideas. With the support of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists, the North, in 1950, attacked and took control of most of the South. In response, U.S. Army general Douglas MacArthur was called to command United Nations forces, of which U.S. troops comprised over 80 percent.

Throughout the Korean War, the United States possessed superior weapons and technology, particularly air power. (Neither the Chinese nor the North Koreans even had an air force.) When attacking, the Chinese used the noise from bugles and drums to confuse the UN and American forces. The U.S. military responded in a manner consistent with its technological superiority: brute force.

According to Dean Rusk, who served as the secretary of state in the Kennedy administration, the United States bombed everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another, including dams, which caused flooding and crop destruction when they burst.²⁷ The U.S. Air Force and Navy dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on North Korea—more than the total tonnage dropped in the Pacific theater of World War II—as well as 32,557 tons of napalm, a liquid chemical that destroys plant life and incinerates human skin. Approximately 3 million Koreans died in the war, about 12 to 14 percent of the country’s total population. Of these deaths, about 1.9 million were North Koreans, possibly 20 percent of their population.²⁸

The U.S. military’s overreliance on technology contributed to overconfidence, from MacArthur all the way down the chain of command. Much of the failure in Korea (and later in Vietnam) was attributable to the generals’ strategic misjudgment and moral unwinding. This is underscored by their self-defeating bombing of Korean population centers, as well as U.S. soldiers’ abusive and sometimes murderous treatment of civilians, which only intensified their enemies’ resolve. In 1951 President Harry Truman finally fired the duplicitous and incompetent General MacArthur, who had helped set the stage for defeat by motivating the Chinese to enter the conflict.

Because the Korean peninsula remained divided after the 1953 armistice, some argue that the Korean War remains a stalemate. But the results of the war contravene this notion. First, over 36,000 U.S. soldiers died in Korea. In addition, as South Korea developed as a nation, it was beset by authoritarianism, repression, martial law, presidential assassination, and a military coup. The Korean War’s most dangerous legacy is that it contributed to North Korea’s motivation to develop nuclear weapons. Most Americans are completely unaware that we destroyed more cities in the North than we did in Japan or Germany during World War II, said historian Bruce Cumings. Every North Korean knows about this, it’s drilled into their minds.²⁹

The military’s failure to win set the stage for North Korea to become a nuclear threat to America. After U.S. bombers destroyed their population centers, the North Koreans came to loathe and distrust the United States. They believed that only nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles could counter America’s technological superiority. After enduring political repression and starvation for nearly seventy years, the North Koreans developed their first nuclear weapon in 2009. Their next goal was met on July 4, 2017, when they successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching Hawaii.³⁰

VIETNAM

Throughout the Cold War, in its fierce and nearly single-minded opposition to communism, America was willing to fight wars or support violent revolutions in Asia, Central America, South America, and Cuba. As in Korea, America’s involvement in Vietnam began with the seeds of a civil war. French control over Vietnam ended in 1954, and, after meetings in Geneva that included France and the Soviet Union, China, Britain, and the United States, Vietnam was split into two zones. Communist leader Ho Chi Minh led the north, while the fervent anti-Communist Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem became president of South Vietnam. Hoping for a fully democratic Vietnam, the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower sent military advisors to train the army of South Vietnam. In 1961 John F. Kennedy sent four hundred Green Berets to train the South Vietnamese army in counterinsurgency against Communist guerrillas.

When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, the United States had over 16,000 advisors in South Vietnam, many of whom were engaged in combat. By March 1965, at the constant urging of the U.S. military, President Lyndon Johnson ordered 82,000 troops to Vietnam, and then another 100,000 in both 1965 and 1966. A year later the total number of U.S. troops in Vietnam was over 500,000. By then, immersed in General William Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition, over 15,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed and nearly 110,000 wounded. Desperate in 1970, and likely in violation of international law, President Richard Nixon ordered U.S. and South Vietnam forces to invade Cambodia in an attempt to cut the supply lines of the North Vietnamese, leading to more death and destruction but no path to victory.³¹

Defense Intelligence Agency reports that the U.S. military would not defeat the North Vietnamese were summarily rejected by army commanders, especially the most influential and longest-serving, General Westmoreland. For four years (1964–1968), Westmoreland claimed that victory was in sight if only America could kill more North Vietnamese. In A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan described the overconfidence and pretension possessed by U.S. generals: By the second decade after World War II, the dominant characteristics of the senior leadership of the American armed forces had become professional arrogance, lack of imagination, and moral and intellectual insensitivity … The attributes were the symptoms of an institutional illness that might most appropriately be called the disease of victory, for it arose out of the victorious response to the challenge of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.³²

In Vietnam, as in Korea, American technology and its military leaders’ judgment were outmatched by North Vietnamese motivation and ingenuity. By the war’s end in 1975, 58,200 U.S. servicemen had been killed, among the 2.7 million U.S. soldiers who participated,³³ and over 300,000 had been wounded. North Vietnam and South Vietnam lost 1 to 3 million people, with 2 million wounded. By almost all accounts, the war was a black eye for the United States and a pointless sacrifice of a generation of young men.

AFGHANISTAN

In fact war is often the undoing of a great power when wars begin to cost too much or go on longer than anticipated, wrote professor Neta Crawford in 2016.³⁴ As in Korea and Vietnam, America found itself embroiled in a civil war in Afghanistan just twenty-six years after the fall of Saigon. The U.S. military’s quick removal of the Taliban from power in November 2001 led to a prolonged and self-defeating stay in Afghanistan, a modern war that is nearing two decades. The continuing war there is particularly disturbing because as early as December 2001 the United States had achieved its prime objective, the removal of al-Qaeda and the Taliban from and establishment of a civilian government in Kabul.³⁵ A compelling argument can be made that the United States should have withdrawn, at the latest, by the end of 2003, when it had only 13,100 troops in Afghanistan. But the administration of George W. Bush and its neoconservative leaders had plans for Afghanistan: they wanted to turn it into a democracy.

Instead, the United States allowed Afghanistan eventually to become more unstable and violent than before the invasion. This seemed predictable; nation building ‘from the outside’ is quite impossible and might delegitimize a state, rather than leading to its gradual rooting in the fabrics of society, according to professor Andreas Wimmer,³⁶ articulating a widely held analysis.

Even though Bush, as a presidential candidate, explicitly spoke out against the futility of nation building, his administration’s policy was just that. In April 2002 he announced a reconstruction plan for Afghanistan, and Congress provided $39 billion to fund the initiative through the end of the decade. On May 1, 2003, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld announced the end of major combat in Afghanistan, when only eight thousand U.S. troops were in the country.³⁷ In August 2003, in its first operational mission outside Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) took control of the International Security Forces (ISAF), which numbered only about five thousand troops.

On October 29, 2004, Osama bin Laden resurfaced and, in a video, explicitly claimed responsibility for the September 11 attacks. He had escaped to Pakistan on horseback during the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. Despite intelligence indicating his presence in the mountains, U.S. forces did not lead the assault, leaving it instead to ragtag Afghan fighters.³⁸ In 2005, after regrouping in Pakistan, the Taliban returned to Afghanistan to engage in widespread violence, successfully using buried improvised explosive devices (IEDS) and suicide bombings to attack U.S. troops and destabilize the U.S.-backed Afghan government. A National Intelligence Estimate released two years later showed that al-Qaeda had actually become stronger than it was six years prior, right before the U.S. invasion.³⁹

The Taliban bounced back. The anti-American sentiment of Afghans increased. Those feelings were nurtured by the sluggish pace of reconstruction, allegations of prisoner abuse at U.S. detention facilities, widespread corruption in the Afghan government, and civilian casualties caused by U.S. and NATO bombings, according to journalist Griff Witte.⁴⁰ A 2015 United Nations report indicated that the Taliban insurgency was then greater than at any time since the United States had attacked in 2001.⁴¹ The next year, American military commanders estimated that the United States might have to keep thousands of troops in … [Afghanistan] for decades.⁴² By the end of 2003, when the U.S. had completed its stated objective of getting rid of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, seventy U.S. service members had died in the war in Afghanistan. Since then, more than 2,300 additional U.S. soldiers have been killed.

President Barack Obama increased the number of troops to a hundred thousand and then promised to reduce it to under ten thousand. In 2017 President Donald Trump added at least four thousand additional troops to Afghanistan, although a chief presidential aide, Steve Bannon, questioned the returns on the $850 billion in nonmilitary spending there.⁴³ Nonetheless, Trump announced later in 2017 an even more open-ended commitment of troops, which numbered fourteen thousand in 2019, because the soldiers deserve a plan for victory.⁴⁴ The next day, retired general David Petraeus, speaking at West Point, said, In Afghanistan, there’s no path to victory that I know of.

The American commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Scott Miller, had said in February of 2019, Neither side will win it militarily, and if neither side will win it militarily you have to move … towards a political settlement here. On April 9, 2019, H. R. McMaster, then a retired general and a former national security advisor for Trump, said in a discussion at West Point, We have never sustained a sound strategy in Afghanistan. In October 2019, having obtained no concessions from the Taliban, the U.S. military, with no public announcement, began withdrawing several thousand troops from Afghanistan.

IRAQ

In 2003, when the United States could have exited Afghanistan after expelling the Taliban, the Bush administration instead turned its sights on Iraq. In the year prior, the administration floated any number of justifications for invading the country. It claimed that Iraq and al-Qaeda had conspired in the September 11 attacks, which was not true. In a memorable formulation, former U.S. counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke offered, Having been attacked by Al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.⁴⁵ The administration then claimed that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who had to go. This truism, known to everyone in the world for over two decades, provided no legal or strategic basis for war. (In the previous decade, when U.S. airplanes were patrolling no-fly zones in Iraq, Saddam hadn’t shot down a single plane.⁴⁶) The final and most infamous claim was that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. This, too, was false.

The invasion of Iraq became inevitable when, on February 5, 2003, a familiar face appeared at the United Nations: secretary of state Colin Powell, a former army general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H. W. Bush. Powell, who regularly topped lists of Most Admired Americans,⁴⁷ held up a faux vial of anthrax in a theatrical presentation and testified that Iraq possessed or was developing weapons of mass destruction.

Years later, evidence showed that Powell believed the opposite to be true. (Iraq’s nuclear weapons program had ended in 1991, and a 2004 report confirmed that the nation had no nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs.) Powell’s reflexive obedience to President Bush was forged in a military culture that elevates loyalty over truth. Clearly, Powell’s loyalty to George Bush extended to being willing to deceive the world, writes Jonathan Schwarz in the Huffington Post. He’s never been held accountable for his actions, and it’s extremely unlikely he ever will be.⁴⁸ Schwarz finds that Powell fabricated or lied repeatedly during his presentation at the United Nations, concluding that Powell was consciously lying: he fabricated ‘evidence’ and ignored repeated warnings that what he was saying was false.⁴⁹

It was the old general’s ultimate sacrifice as a good soldier, writes military commentator Tom Ricks, who notes that Powell’s reputation may have been the first casualty of the Iraq War.⁵⁰

Even without weapons of mass destruction, Iraq’s culture and society would make it a difficult place to conquer. Southern Iraq, Mesopotamia, was one of the birthplaces of civilization, where the Code of Hammurabi, possibly the first written code of law, was created prior to 1750 B.C.E. Introduced to Arab Islamic rule in the Middle Ages, Iraq would not quickly embrace Western values. Despite this history, vice president Dick Cheney claimed on television that my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.⁵¹

In Iraq, the illusion of painless engagement … was short-lived, according to author Frank Rich.⁵² The invasion destabilized Iraq and much of the Middle East and was accompanied by a bewildering lack of planning for running the country after Saddam Hussein was deposed.

As the war planning had progressed over the nearly 16 months, writes Bob Woodward, "Powell had felt that the easier the war looked, the less Rumsfeld, the Pentagon and [General Tommy] Franks had worried about the aftermath. They seemed