Unlearning the War: Part I
An account of how I learned firsthand about the failures of the military industrial complex and so unwound my own military career
My dad’s war was Vietnam. Mine was Afghanistan, but a lot of my peers were sent to Iraq or toured both. Those last two conflicts, a more precise term for undeclared wars, had nearly universal support from our countrymen after 9/11. I was not yet 17 on that fateful day, but I remember listening in as President George W. Bush rallied the patriotic fervor for what turned out to be two decades of conflict that ended in a very poorly executed and reckless withdrawal from a warlord run pile of rocks that has been unconquerable since man first drew breath there.
This piece has correlation to my beliefs about foreign policy, a political matter, but it is most certainly not a political piece. It is intended to engage your mind, perhaps going as far to reprogram it, to question what Americans have been fed since World War II concluded about this perceived need that we are responsible for all the world’s problems. We must question the notion that America is the world’s police force. I was gung-ho about the Global War on Terrorism as I was going through ROTC at Ole Miss. In those days, the late oughtsand early tens, if you didn’t have a combat patch on your right sleeve within your first three years in the Army, people would look at you like you had been hiding somewhere. Even though Vietnam had been a cluster, and we had parked troops all over the world for decades before and after, we all thought this time it could be different.
My tour in Afghanistan began in mid-2010 during what was known as the surge, a move by President Obama to turn up troop levels during the Taliban’s peak fighting season to make gains toward ambiguous objectives that were largely undefined along a pathway to victory that seemingly didn’t exist. General McChrystal bit the dust the first week I was in country, and within days, I was immersed and drinking from the proverbial firehose as my battalion-sized task force’s S2, a First Lieutenant. In the first few months of my tour, I was too busy to think about the why regarding our mission.
Once I felt more comfortable, and I had processed the death of my father that had been weighing on me all summer, I alternated between late day/early evening shifts and graveyard shifts. On the latter, once I sent out the intelligence summary, I would usually pick up a book. I read more books on that tour than I’ve read in the 13 years since I’ve returned. We had a warrant officer in the task force, who later took his own life, who was grounded from flying the AH-64D Apache, which relegated him to staff roles. One night, during night shift, he quipped to me, “using the United States Army to conduct a counterinsurgency operation is like using a battle axe to perform open heart surgery.” This warrant officer was an atheist and held opposing political views to mine, but we shared friendly banter and challenged one another regularly. He challenged me to prove him wrong, so I ordered a book that has since shaped my understanding of the military industrial complex and the fallacy of counterinsurgency operations. That book is Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare by Carter Malkasian and Daniel Marston. I highly recommend that all who would like example after example of centuries of military errors at the ready get a copy.