A veteran general hears echoes from Vietnam in Iraq
By Nancy A. Youssef
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Volney Warner thinks big. A retired Army four-star general who helped craft counterinsurgency doctrine during the Vietnam War, he's made a career out of thinking about how U.S. military strategy should advance America's global interests.
How does domestic politics shape military tactics? How and why did U.S. civilian and military leaders fail in Vietnam and Iraq ? What has Iraq taught the U.S. military about unconventional war?
Warner is more than a detached student of America's current conflicts: Seven of his immediate family members have served in the military, five of them in Iraq or Afghanistan . They include his two sons, one a retired brigadier general and the other a retired colonel; a son-in-law who trained local troops in Iraq as a brigadier general; a granddaughter who's a captain in the Army Reserve ; a grandson serving in Iraq and another grandson at West Point who'll be commissioned as an officer in June and probably ordered to a war zone immediately.
Also, Warner's 24-year-old granddaughter, Army 1st Lt. Laura Walker , who served in Iraq in 2004 and was killed by a homemade bomb a year later on her second combat tour, this time in Afghanistan . Her death makes Warner ponder, sometimes publicly, who was responsible for sending his granddaughter to two war zones without a sound strategy for victory.
A highly regarded expert on counterinsurgency who enjoys a reputation among his peers as a sharp thinker who pulls no punches, Warner asks why the U.S. military— with all its tradition, training, equipment and support— has failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam and apply them to Iraq . He gave his answers in a series of interviews with a McClatchy Newspapers reporter.
Iraq and Vietnam , he said, are both products of failed civilian and military leadership. Presidents John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush began with flawed aims and assumptions, and in both cases they produced military strategies that were doomed to fail.
"If the strategy is wrong and the policy is wrong, you can't blame the people implementing it. They are trying to implement a political strategy that won't work. It's very difficult to turn the train around," said Warner, who at 81 heads a defense consulting firm in McLean, Va . "I have to believe that military leaders in positions of trust and confidence may have made stupid decisions (in the course of fighting an insurgency), but never with malice aforethought towards the country that spawned them and certainly not with intent to destroy the lives of those soldiers who believed in them, trusted their decisions and carried out their orders to their deaths."
(Continued here.)
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Volney Warner thinks big. A retired Army four-star general who helped craft counterinsurgency doctrine during the Vietnam War, he's made a career out of thinking about how U.S. military strategy should advance America's global interests.
How does domestic politics shape military tactics? How and why did U.S. civilian and military leaders fail in Vietnam and Iraq ? What has Iraq taught the U.S. military about unconventional war?
Warner is more than a detached student of America's current conflicts: Seven of his immediate family members have served in the military, five of them in Iraq or Afghanistan . They include his two sons, one a retired brigadier general and the other a retired colonel; a son-in-law who trained local troops in Iraq as a brigadier general; a granddaughter who's a captain in the Army Reserve ; a grandson serving in Iraq and another grandson at West Point who'll be commissioned as an officer in June and probably ordered to a war zone immediately.
Also, Warner's 24-year-old granddaughter, Army 1st Lt. Laura Walker , who served in Iraq in 2004 and was killed by a homemade bomb a year later on her second combat tour, this time in Afghanistan . Her death makes Warner ponder, sometimes publicly, who was responsible for sending his granddaughter to two war zones without a sound strategy for victory.
A highly regarded expert on counterinsurgency who enjoys a reputation among his peers as a sharp thinker who pulls no punches, Warner asks why the U.S. military— with all its tradition, training, equipment and support— has failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam and apply them to Iraq . He gave his answers in a series of interviews with a McClatchy Newspapers reporter.
Iraq and Vietnam , he said, are both products of failed civilian and military leadership. Presidents John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush began with flawed aims and assumptions, and in both cases they produced military strategies that were doomed to fail.
"If the strategy is wrong and the policy is wrong, you can't blame the people implementing it. They are trying to implement a political strategy that won't work. It's very difficult to turn the train around," said Warner, who at 81 heads a defense consulting firm in McLean, Va . "I have to believe that military leaders in positions of trust and confidence may have made stupid decisions (in the course of fighting an insurgency), but never with malice aforethought towards the country that spawned them and certainly not with intent to destroy the lives of those soldiers who believed in them, trusted their decisions and carried out their orders to their deaths."
(Continued here.)
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