PBS Frontline – Gen. Joseph P. Hoar (U.S. Marine Corps-Ret.) was commander of CENTCOM from 1991 to 1994. In the build-up to war in Iraq, he supported from the outside Colin Powell’s reservations about the consequences, joined other military figures to oppose the war plan and more recently to support John Kerry. In this interview, Hoar explains how the concept of military transformation has developed over the years, and why it should be executed cautiously.”We were going to be lighter, faster, and we were going to depend more on technology. That part of it was clear — so far so good,” he tells FRONTLINE. “But I think one of the things that the Iraqi campaign has shown us is that you need to go very slowly when you talk about reducing the size of the armed forces.”
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Washington Post – Thomas Ricks on how T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” contains important, but overlooked lessons for the Americans in Iraq.
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PBS Frontline – Gen. Thomas White (U.S. Army-Ret.) was Secretary of the Army from 2001 until April 2003, when he was fired by Donald Rumsfeld. In this interview, he talks about Rumsfeld’s leadership style and drive to remake the military, the Defense Department’s rigid control in planning for a post-war Iraq, and why he believes the Army is on the brink of being broken. “What we are all worried about is that the manpower situation will come unglued. ??? The Army is people; it’s not weapons or platforms. Somebody once said, ‘A soldier’s not in the Army; they are the Army.'”

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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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PBS Frontline – An outstanding documentary on the inside story of the war within the Pentagon: Donald Rumsfeld’s battle to assert civilian control and remake the way America fights???all the while conducting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is the transcript of the show. In future days I’ll be linking to the extensive interviews conducted with each participant in the show. The transcript gives a broad overview of the topic. The interviews give fascinating detail of the conflict with Iraq.
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