In laying the blame for all that went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan at the feet of our senior military officers, he lets our political leadership and the other departments of the government mainly off the hook. While he discusses the drawbacks of counterinsurgency, saying the American military is not built for it and questioning the American public’s ability to stomach it, he fails to take successive Secretaries of Defense to task for their part in not asking the hard questions of their senior military advisors and of a lack of clear whole of government strategy in prosecuting the conflicts. He does not question the decisions, strategic guidance, or policy making timelines of both the Bush and Obama administrations. While this book adds to the scholarship on the conflicts since the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is not a complete history nor analysis of why the conflicts ended, in Bolger’s words, as “two lost campaigns and a war gone awry”
In laying the blame for all that went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan at the feet of our senior military officers, he lets our political leadership and the other departments of the government mainly off the hook. While he discusses the drawbacks of counterinsurgency, saying the American military is not built for it and questioning the American public’s ability to stomach it, he fails to take successive Secretaries of Defense to task for their part in not asking the hard questions of their senior military advisors and of a lack of clear whole of government strategy in prosecuting the conflicts. He does not question the decisions, strategic guidance, or policy making timelines of both the Bush and Obama administrations. While this book adds to the scholarship on the conflicts since the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is not a complete history nor analysis of why the conflicts ended, in Bolger’s words, as “two lost campaigns and a war gone awry”