PBS Frontline – Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper (U.S. Marine Corps-Ret.) is a veteran of Vietnam and Desert Storm and currently lecturer at the National Defense University. He spoke with FRONTLINE about the lessons learned from those past wars, his bitterness over what has happened in post-war Iraq, and the failures of the Pentagon’s civilian leaders: “We don’t have a leadership that’s involved intellectually,” he says. “They simply want to will their way to this transformation. They don’t want to get involved themselves and help think the way through.” Despite this, Van Riper, a scholar of warfare, is hopeful: “I see inside the United States Army the germs of a second intellectual renaissance that’s approaching these problems. And they’re not caught up in the sloganeering that most of the Joint community’s caught up in. They really are studying.”

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