Daniel P. Bolger > Quotes

“What of the election? In that, Hamid Karzai had to be pretty happy. The hundred or so voters in Barg-e Matal on August 20 generated four thousand votes. Every one of them favored the serving Afghan president.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“O gods, from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghan—deliver us. —TRADITIONAL HINDU PRAYER”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier. —RUDYARD KIPLING, “THE YOUNG BRITISH SOLDIER”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“follow the wise counsel of Khushal Khan Khattak , the great rebel leader who fought the invading Mughals in the seventeenth century:   When you fight a smaller enemy detachment you should decisively attack with surprise. But, if the enemy receives reinforcement [or] when you encounter a stronger enemy force, avoid decisive engagement and swiftly withdraw only to hit back where the enemy is vulnerable. By this you gain sustainability and the ability to fight a long war of attrition . . . A war of attrition eventually frustrates the enemy, no matter how strong he may be.   It matched almost exactly Mao Zedong’s more elegant formula:   Enemy advances, we retreat. Enemy halts, we harass. Enemy tires, we attack. Enemy retreats, we pursue.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying newspapers to believe that we were being whipped all the time now realize the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience. —MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“In 1944, B-17 bomber formations dropped 9,070 bombs in order to hit one German building. In 1967, F-105 jet fighter-bombers used 176 munitions to knock out a single North Vietnamese building. By 1991, a smart F-16 fighter-bomber could do the job with thirty bombs, or just one, if the bomb was smart too.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“In the West, military intelligence (MI) analysts have long followed a simple premise: Assess enemy capabilities, not intentions.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“Master Sun put it simply: “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril” We failed on both counts. I know I sure did. As generals, we did not know our enemy—never pinned him down, never focused our efforts, and got all too good at making new opponents before we’d handled the old ones.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“The U.S. collected information superbly and everywhere, from space to dirt. They tracked all kinds of events and things and people. For long-lead-time matters, like the order of battle for the Chinese fleet, that sufficed. For short-fuse needs, it got much, much more excruciating. Of the mass of data gathered, only a small percentage (50 percent? 10 percent? 5 percent?) ever got analyzed. Only a tiny fraction of that produced the specificity to allow action.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“The opposition remained maddeningly opaque. Intelligence people scratched their heads. A January 25, 2004, count of detainees totaled 9,754. Casualty estimates ran to at least that number. So, essentially, the U.S. and its partners had captured and killed the entire insurgency. Yet the bad guys were still out there.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“The Taliban cannot militarily defeat us—but we can defeat ourselves.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“In the armed forces, those who fight on the ground generally see those on ships as much better off. The Marines live in both worlds, and they have strong views. Major General Julian C. Smith put it well on the eve of the bloody 1943 Tarawa landing: “Even though you Navy officers do come in to about a thousand yards, I remind you that you have a little armor. I want you to know that Marines are crossing that beach with bayonets, and the only armor they will have is a khaki shirt.” As an admiral who had risen from the ranks once told an Army infantryman, the worst wardroom always trumps the best foxhole.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“What makes armed conflict even more subject to Murphy’s Law, and renders even simple acts so difficult, involves the danger of sudden death or serious injury. When you bet your life and those of others, fear, bravery, and strong emotions play huge roles. Killing is easy, but dealing with the act is not. Punches get pulled, hesitations occur, and though most are aggressive in the first contact, few stand up so willingly under fire the second time, or the twenty-second, let alone the hundred and second.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“The Taliban probably found it all amusing, as the ignorant occupiers essentially provided their foes’ death benefits.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“America’s innate uneasiness with death from above. It ill accords with the values of a democratic republic.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“In the summer of 2003, facing a lengthy Iraq counterinsurgency, the U.S. Army bit the bullet. One-year unit rotations became the rule.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“The military could get by with fewer recruits because more in the ranks reenlisted. The quality of the volunteers turned out to be good, because the services insisted on drug-free high-school graduates with clean criminal records, criteria that ruled out 70 percent of American youth. (There is an unfortunate message in that statistic.) Smarter, tougher, and willing, volunteers trained and worked to their limits.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“Coalition countries stood ready to fight to the last American soldier and dollar.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“Afghanistan. Jarrah”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“Schoomaker’s reorganization went beyond the line-and-block charts. He demanded, and got, authority to re-equip the force wholesale. In SOF, the leadership has long enjoyed independent procurement authority not tied to the slow, cumbersome acquisition laws that often make it hard to get a new tank or even a new pistol in less than a decade. Schoomaker asked for similar authority for the conventional forces. He got most of what he asked for.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“of”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“So there it stood. Al-Qaeda had been run off and disrupted, left badly disorganized, but not killed. The parts and franchises, the copycats and wannabes, took up where the Sheikh and company had left off. In December of 2001, we just didn’t have the manhunters, and, more to the point, the manhunters didn’t have the good scenters and able beaters to track down and tear apart a terrorist network, whether large or small, transnational or local. We could smash it—and we did—but we could not kill it, not yet.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“The MI folks could usually tell you the make, model, year, paint color, and license plate of the semitrailer truck that just ran over you.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“the military started the campaigns by turning off the personnel system”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“Ten days after Bush’s speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Ambassador L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III took charge of a new strategic headquarters, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). After less than three weeks in country, Garner’s ORHA was no more. Bremer was in charge. In the ambassador’s words, “I had the requisite skills and experience for that position.” He did not speak Arabic, although he had served in Kabul, Afghanistan, from 1966 to 1968, which was something. His most notable assignment had been as ambassador to the Netherlands from 1983 to 1986. Bremer enjoyed close connections to the Bush White House. Now he was the president’s man in Baghdad.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“At Abu Ghraib, several prisoners mixed it up with guards on October 18, 2003, led by a detainee with a smuggled pistol. A few of the MPs chose their own countermeasure, not unlike the 1-8 Infantry soldiers at the Tigris River. That night, five enlisted MPs pulled twelve Iraqi prisoners from their cells. They stripped the captives naked and then piled them in sexually humiliating positions. A week or so later, the same guards put a hooded man on a box with fake electrodes clipped on his fingers; the prisoner was told the wires were real, and if he stepped off the box, he’d be electrocuted. Three days later, the same MPs again stripped prisoners and put them in sexually embarrassing poses. This incident also involved K-9 police dogs. A trio of military intelligence soldiers participated. These abuses were not linked to any interrogation. The soldiers later explained that they were teaching the Iraqis a lesson, the same reason offered by the soldiers in 1-8 Infantry. The MPs, however, took a lot of pictures.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“General George Patton wrote from long experience: “There are more tired division commanders than there are tired divisions. Tired officers are always pessimists.” The lieutenant was tired. His sergeants were not. They wanted to continue the mission.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“one of the duties of the U.S. Navy, going all the way back to the early 1800s, the days of the Barbary pirates of North Africa, involves showing the flag. Safe passage of Navy ships ensures unmolested transit of merchant shipping, always the main conduit of all overseas trade whether in 1800 or 2000. Port calls projected U.S. influence ashore and kept markets open. Freedom of the seas, like all freedoms, must be exercised or it will atrophy.”
― Daniel P. Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

“The Sheikh determined to do something so large that the consequent American retaliation had to result in large numbers of people on the ground in the red dust of the Registan Desert and the jagged heights of the Hindu Kush Mountains.”
― Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars