Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, by Daniel Bolger
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Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, by Daniel Bolger
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“Why We Lost is neither a memoir nor a window into private meetings and secret discussions. It is a 500-page history . . . filled with heartfelt stories of soldiers and Marines in firefights and close combat. It weighs in mightily to the ongoing debate over how the United States should wage war.” — Washington Post Over his thirty-five year career, Daniel Bolger rose through the ranks of the army infantry to become a three-star general, commanding in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps more than anyone else, he was witness to the full extent of the wars, from 9/11 to withdrawal from the region. Not only did Bolger participate in top-level planning and strategy meetings, but he also regularly carried a rifle alongside soldiers in combat actions. Writing with hard-won experience and unflinching honesty, he argues that while we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, we did not have to. Intelligence was garbled. Key decision makers were blinded by spreadsheets or theories. And we never really understood our enemy. Why We Lost is a timely, forceful, and compulsively readable account of these wars from a fresh and authoritative perspective. “Compelling.” — Wall Street Journal “Bolger is a superb writer, and the book’s most riveting passages are those describing what it’s like to be an infantryman at the sharp end of battle.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, by Daniel Bolger- Amazon Sales Rank: #259989 in Books
- Published on: 2015-11-03
- Released on: 2015-11-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.42" w x 5.31" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 560 pages
Review "I am glad to see someone of [Bolger's] caliber tackling this subject."--Tom Ricks, ForeignPolicy.com
From the Inside Flap A high-ranking general’s account of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how it all went wrong Over a thirty-five-year career, Daniel Bolger rose through the army infantry to become a three-star general, filling key command roles in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He took part in meetings with top-level military and civilian officials, where strategy was made and managed. But, unlike most generals, he also regularly carried a rifle alongside rank-and-file soldiers in combat. His knowledge of the Global War on Terrorism — both in principle and in practice — is unmatched. Now Bolger offers a unique, unsparing, and fascinating assessment of this epochal conflict, from the run-up to 9/11 to the drawdown of troops more than a decade later. Written with breathtaking immediacy and unflinching honesty, this taut, brave book takes us deep inside the military establishment to explain why we lost — and why we didn’t have to. Though America boasts the world’s best-trained, best-equipped military — many of whose thrilling successes and unnerving challenges are recounted here — it failed time and again to capitalize on the skills and courage our forces displayed in combat. Intelligence was garbled. Key decision makers were blinded by spreadsheets and theories. And, at the root of our failure, we never really understood our enemy. Why We Lost is an urgent and riveting examination of these wars from a perspective of unsurpassed authority and candor.
From the Back Cover “Why We Lost is neither a memoir nor a window into private meetings and secret discussions. It is a 500-page history . . . filled with heartfelt stories of soldiers and Marines in firefights and close combat. It weighs in mightily to the ongoing debate over how the United States should wage war.” — Washington Post Over his thirty-five year career, Daniel Bolger rose through the ranks of the army infantry to become a three-star general, commanding in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps more than anyone else, he was witness to the full extent of the wars, from 9/11 to withdrawal from the region. Not only did Bolger participate in top-level planning and strategy meetings, but he also regularly carried a rifle alongside soldiers in combat actions. Writing with hard-won experience and unflinching honesty, he argues that while we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, we did not have to. Intelligence was garbled. Key decision makers were blinded by spreadsheets or theories. And we never really understood our enemy. Why We Lost is a timely, forceful, and compulsively readable account of these wars from a fresh and authoritative perspective. “Compelling.” — Wall Street Journal “Bolger is a superb writer, and the book’s most riveting passages are those describing what it’s like to be an infantryman at the sharp end of battle.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer DANIEL BOLGER completed thirty-five years in the U.S. Army, retiring as a lieutenant general in 2013, having held command posts in Iraq and Afghanistan. His military awards include five Bronze Star medals (one for valor) and the Combat Action Badge.
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153 of 164 people found the following review helpful. An honest analysis of the last 24 years in Iraq and Afghanistan By Connie "I am a United Sates Army general, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism. It's like Alcoholics Anonymous; step one is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. So do my peers. And thanks to our problem, now all of America has a problem, to wit: two lost campaigns and a war gone awry." This is the first sentence of this book, in the "Author's Notes," written by retired Lieutenant General Daniel P Bolger, who leaves out the usual "LTG, (Ret)" off his name.Bolger served 35 years in the US Army. He earned his MA and PhD, both in Russian History, from the University of Chicago and taught history at West Point. This man knows his history. He also knows how to write an engaging history piece that keeps the reader riveted. It sure kept me up late at night.Bolger was active duty for the entire duration of the Iraqi War, retiring in 2013. His references include his own meetings he attended, military journals, briefings. As a LG, many of the people he writes about where in his command. He tells the story the way it unfolds, starting with Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Things could have been so different then had the US Army gone into Baghdad and taken Saddam Hussein. Instead, we backed off, allowing the enemy and its allies to regroup and resupply for the bigger war ten years later.Veterans who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan from 2001 to 2013 may recall many of the names in this book. Bolger holds nothing back. This is a history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and war is never nice. Some of the battles come back to life with details not released to the media at the time. Others end with an analysis never before mentioned by a general.Bolger starts with the bombing of the USS Cole in the port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Osama bin Laden's (UBL) al-Qaeda (AQ) henchmen were at work, executed their mission, and then waited for the US to respond. They had been waiting since the early 1990s, when members of AQ had bombed embassies in Africa and the World Trade Center in New York. Bolger assesses that UBL wanted to lure the US into a ground war in Afghanistan, where the majority of his fighters were willing to work because there was no organized leadership. And besides, insurgent fighters had years of experience fighting the Russians, who had no choice but to pull out. The actions by AQ in the 1990s were the harbinger of more to come when AQ executed 9/11. They had ten years to wait. AQ is good at waiting out conflicts. This is one thing Bolger gives credit to AQ and the insurgents. Waiting out and striking when least expected is not the American way to fight.Thus begins a detailed account of the war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Protecting the homeland was the Department of Defense (DoD)'s first mission, but offensive operations in Afghanistan proved harder to execute. Special Operations were the first in Afghanistan, and our first casualty was a CIA officer, Michael Spann. Our first big mistake early on was not losing warriors, but the treatment of our captives. Were they prisoners-of-war (the military calls them "enemy prisoners of war" or EPWs) or combatants. The heated discussion in the Bush administration was quite public. The Taliban were airbombed and dispersed, hiding in caves or fleeing into Pakistan. Secretary of Defense (SecDef) Donald Rumsfeld, who dictated war moves, declared the Taliban defeated. They were not defeated; they simply dispersed into hard-to-reach valleys and mountains of western Pakistan to rethink their strategy and strike again five years later. Our mistake was thinking we had destroyed them.All we did was run them off and disrupt them, leaving them badly disorganized. But we did not kill them (72). The DoD went on a manhunt looking for UBL and his lieutenants.Each chapter focuses on a mistake the leaders back in Washington and the generals on the ground made. There are too many errors that were made that Bolger reveals: unfamiliarity with the terrain, the enemy, outdated field manuals that didn't work in insurgent warfare, personality conflicts between generals. General Tommy Franks had quite a job to get done, but even he was given his directive from the SecDef. The generals were prepared for a quick and decisive war. The enemy had other plans, now that American troops were on the ground.Many pages are devoted to what mistakes were made in the early years, from 2001 through 2005. Focusing on taking EPWs and their documents without quickly exploiting them, unclear directives of EPW handling, lack of any kind of cohesion all added to the quagmire. Coalition forces wanted the US troops to stay, while public outcry of American casualties began to grow. "Stay until the mission is done. And what mission might that be?" (95) Bolger asks. The rest of the book shows that American planners were unsure of where to go, what to focus on because the enemy kept shifting gears. The wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq were seen as a war against the same enemy. They were not. Even F-16 fighter jets could not always evade the Surface-to-Air missiles that the enemy had hidden high in remote mountains. "Taken to extremes, airpower can finish off an entire nation. But unless you're willing to go all the way, and the enemy fully knows and accepts that, airpower cannot control ground. It cannot make a determined people submit to US control" (107).And what was that story about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Bolger explains that very well in his chapter of "A Weapon of Mass Destruction." He sheds some light on some oversights going back to our air war over Iraq in 1991. We expected to be welcomed as liberators. We were not. We instead found angry and armed Shi'a Arabs willing to finish off the war as they saw fit. Their version wasn't in any of our US Army field manuals, or even in the mission statement.Fast-forward to 2009 with President Obama in charge and the DoD was still looking for alternatives. Yes, Obama inherited a war he hadn't wanted, and campaigned with the promise to end it. Instead of dictating war moves, he listened to his generals. By 2009 "Obama and his team looked at Iraq and saw Vietname 1971, a bad war righted just enough to crawl to an end, the generals and admirals thought they had glimpsed Korea 1953, a botched war redeemed to a stalemate and, with a long-term US commitment, perhaps even a sort of win" (322).Bolger is a very engaging writer, and his attention to detail as a historian shows. He can recall events as if they happened yesterday. He can explain military tactics, maneuvers and equipment in the simplest of terms for the non-military reader. This is what makes this book so fascinating to read. For once we have a retired general write a book that does not pat himself on the back for a job well done, but instead makes him and his peers sit back and humbly admit grave mistakes that were done from the start. No one person is to blame. No one is singled out for ruining it for everyone else. Bolger does not fingerpoint. Instead, what he has written here is a detailed history of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars recalled with a historian's eyes and a soldier's passion. Gory details of US soldiers getting blown up are left out, but names of many fallen are mentioned to tell the full story. There are maps to help the reader with locations.This book will let anyone understand what went wrong, to hopefully allow the next generation of leaders understand how to fight and win, and to understand how the current mindset of extremist fighters in Iraq and Syria came about.Disclaimer: I am a retired US Army Senior NCO who served in Iraq from mid 2006 to late 2007.
47 of 48 people found the following review helpful. when you're lying wounded on the Afghanistan plain ... By Robert D. Harmon This is a candid, heartfelt and perceptive look at the US-led campaigns, 2001-2014, in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's not a spoiler to say that Gen. Bolger spells out how the two campaigns came to muddled ends. While his book doesn't have a fall-of-Saigon ending - and this book published before the full emergence of the Islamic state - it does mark the effective US departure from both wars, at least this time. The blame for this debacle, he says, is in the civilian leadership and generals, and he counts himself among them.His narrative is a full-on, but terse, military history of both conflicts, post-9/11, and he includes background with the Soviet and British empires' experience there. His post-9/11 story is almost episodic: a series of tactical incidents that demonstrate, time and again, that US and coalition forces fought well, fought smart, adapted, in a never-ending cycle of victory, withdrawal to base, return. The men and women fought superbly, he asserts, and their efforts weren't the reason for the ultimate end. He even demonstrates that coalition forces, including Iraqi army and Sunni militias, could be part of the successes, and tells us much about the Awakening ("sahwa") offensive by the latter in Iraq.He also tells of the personalities involved, the minor US and local tactical leaders, and of the generals - Abizaid, Casey, Odierno, among others, not to mention the charismatic and puzzling David Petraeus ("Malik Daoud," King David), a T.E. Lawrence figure in Gen. Bolger's telling, complete with his own book, Army Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency. It's a small but telling aside that Gen. Bolger mentions other Army doctrinal writing - the 1976, 1982 and 1993 editions of FM 100-5, Operations - which suggests both the Army's evolving tactics and also Gen. Bolger's inside knowledge -- FM 100-5 really was compelling reading in the Army, then. He also references other literature of the region, Lawrence, Kipling (he quotes "when you're lying wounded on the Afghanistan plain" in Petraeus' context).One false note: Gen. Bolger's brusque dismissal of the Abu Ghraib affair, and his bald assertion that "the U.S. military did not torture anyone" there. He could have said more to back this up: for one thing, elsewhere in the book he mentions the Army's common use of staff field investigations under Army Regulation 15-6 to deal with incidents with civilians. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's 15-6 accusatory report on Abu Ghraib is public record, but Gen. Bolger doesn't touch on it. (He also says little about "contractors", both at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in these wars, and their role does need examining). Gen. Bolger does talk, in other chapters, of civilians killed in encounters with US personnel, candidly enough, and his main point seems valid: that even the best-trained and -disciplined personnel might go rogue if driven too hard, for too long.His conclusions can be surprising: that al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was just about destroyed by the end of 2001, and that, once invaded, a 2003 pullout in Iraq would have been disastrous enough. Still, he tells us that a stable, democratic republic in Mesopotamia was too "high-flown" a war objective, and that pacification of Afghanistan - a job the Soviet and British empires could not do - was ultimately in vain as well.So, Gen. Bolger's book still is worth a high recommendation, if only because of its timeliness, now that US forces seem to be re-entering Iraq (Nov. 2014). He tells us why, more than how, both campaigns ended in futility. He does tell us just how much of the combatants' courage, training, and suffering went into this, and it's worth absorbing by readers, and policy-makers, before the US attempts something like this again.
105 of 114 people found the following review helpful. As a narrative history, an excellent work - but not as provocative as the title implies By Nathan Webster Daniel Bolger has provided an outstanding narrative history of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and he's done solid research in integrating material from dozens of sources. He provides both compelling combat narratives, and gives a step back to the larger political and military strategic questions as well.He has on-the-ground insight across the theater, and steps in now and then to provide additional context, although it's mostly an objective historical account.However, it is not as provocative as the title led me to believe. While I didn't expect full-on regret and recrimination, I did expect deeper reflection than I found here. My instincts say that he wrote the history first, and the publisher knew that a more in-your-face title would do better in the marketplace. His opening, where he compares himself to an alcoholic admitting he has a problem is not followed up on. Dramatic prologue, sure, but the book quickly settles into a more objective - and always US-centric - narrative.He does provide an epilogue of more serious soul-searching, but it has a bit of a tacked-on feel. During the narrative itself he never steps back to explain why a decision was wrong, and why it led to such disastrous outcomes. Even Paul Bremer's catastrophic decision to fire the Iraqi Army is hardly critiqued at all (and I'm not saying Bremer was even wrong - simply that the outcome was a fiasco). I have read many narratives of small-unit combat - those aren't new to me. I wanted something more honest and far-reaching - an explanation of WHY certain small events led to larger failures.Very occasionally, and very subtly, his disappointment with events comes across. He concludes a chapter on the 2004 Fallujah battle with an anecdote about Marines spraypainting a bridge, "this is for the Americans who died here." So the chapter ends on an uplifting patriotic note - which aggravated me, since we know how it turned out - but then his next chapter turned that on its head with the opening line "They should have known better." Which I appreciated. But it was very subtle, small, and not enough. A few bitter lines do not earn a title announcing "Why We Lost." He snarks a bit about the ambitions of David Petraeus, but nothing I haven't seen before; the abysmally-incompetent Tommy Franks gets off pretty much scot-free (or not even incompetent - just totally unimaginative). He slightly mocks the "over-zealous" Michael Hastings, whose story got Stanley McChrystal fired - the implication being a truly patriotic reporter would have self-censored his reporting in support of the war effort. Never mind that a general with a 30-year-career who can't seem to navigate working with a 30-year-old reporter maybe isn't the best guy to run a war.I'm not some kneejerk anti-war person. I'm an Army veteran of the 1991 Gulf War, and returned to Iraq several times as a photojournalist embedded with soldiers. It would be easy for this review to turn into a screed about why I think we lost - but that's not my goal. I wanted Bolger to do that. I wanted one of these Iraq-Afghanistan books - so many of which rely on specific examples of US soldier's heroism while ignoring the futility of the big picture - to tackle these failures head-on from the military leadership perspective, and this did not provide it.Another review correctly pointed out that Bolger is quick to defend the actions of individual leaders and even senior leaders - a battalion commander is "tired," so he tries to cover up a possible summary execution. Those little events added up to big defeats, and they deserve a harsher reckoning - IF, again, you're going to title a book "Why We Lost."As I said, as a narrative history this was really strong - easily a 4-star reading experience.But that's not what I wanted, not what I expected, and not what the title promised. Truly harsh introspection and raw honesty will have to come later, from another retired officer willing to look himself in the mirror and give hard answers about the generation-crushing failures of the last 13 years of war.
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