Consequences of linear thinking in Afghanistan and Iraq included overestimating indigenous forces' capabilities, underestimating the enemy, and the associated expectation that the coalition could soon reduce force levels and shift to an exclusively advisory effort.
We often operate effectively on the physical battleground but not on the psychological battleground. We fail to communicate our resolve.
When we came to Iraq, we didn't understand the complexity - what it meant for a society to live under a brutal dictatorship with ethnic and sectarian divisions. When we first got here, we made a lot of mistakes. We were like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot of things.
The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the 'New York Times' or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C.
Although combat operations unseated the Taliban and the Saddam Hussein regime, a poor understanding of the recent histories of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples undermined efforts to consolidate early battlefield gains into lasting security.
It is in their inherent moral components that recent Western strategies may be deficient. What percentage of the populations in countries engaged in the 14-year effort in Afghanistan could even name the three main Taliban groups with whom their soldiers have been engaged?
It is clear that while our Army was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia studied U.S. capabilities and vulnerabilities and embarked on an ambitious and largely successful modernization effort.
Lyndon Johnson was a profoundly insecure man who feared dissent and craved reassurance. In 1964 and 1965, Johnson's principal goals were to win the presidency in his own right and to pass his Great Society legislation through Congress.
There are two ways to fight the United States military: asymmetrically and stupid. Asymmetrically means you're going to try to avoid our strengths. In the 1991 Gulf War, it's like we called Saddam's army out into the schoolyard and beat up that army.
I think any of us who have been involved in the mission of Iraq have developed a great deal of affection for the Iraqi people and are emotionally invested in what we think is a vital mission... So I think any of my contemporaries would welcome the opportunity to go back and make a contribution to this extraordinarily important mission.
The key thing about force protection is... if you focus too much on force protection, and you disengage yourself from the community, you're putting yourself at greater risk because you need to interact with the community in a positive way to gain the intelligence you need.
In the years leading up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, thinking about defense was driven by ideas that regarded successful military operations as ends in themselves rather than just one instrument of power that must be coordinated with others to achieve - and sustain - political goals.
War is, in fact, an extension of politics, and in any war, military operations have to be conducted in such a way that they contribute to sustainable political outcomes consistent with vital interests that are at stake in that war.
Be skeptical of concepts that divorce war from its political nature, particularly those that promise fast, cheap victory through technology.
The professed war-weariness among populations who have sent only a small percentage of their sons and daughters to fight in recent wars may derive from a failure to communicate effectively what is at stake in those wars and explain why the efforts are worthy of the risks, resources, and sacrifices necessary to sustain the strategy.
It's astounding the degree to which these communities are intermarried. Iraq is a crazy quilt of ethnicities and religious sects.
What we have found is that we were the principal mediators in many cases between the Iraqis and their own security forces and their own government, and so you have to almost embrace that role.
You have to keep listening and thinking and being critical and self-critical. Remember General Nivelle, in the First World War, at Verdun? He said he had the solution and then destroyed the French Army until it mutinied.
What we can afford least is to define the problem of future war as we would like it to be and, by doing so, introduce into our defense vulnerabilities based on self-delusion.
My personal experience in Ninawa Province has been that, at the most fundamental level, people don't really care if it's a Shiite, a Sunni, a Kurd, or a Turkoman that's providing them security as long as that force treats them with respect.
