PBS Frontline – Thomas E. Ricks, the Post’s Pentagon correspondent, has long covered the Pentagon and U.S. military. Since the war’s official end in spring 2003 he has visited Iraq several times. In this interview, he discusses Rumsfeld’s personality and leadership at the Pentagon and his push to transform the way the military thinks and fights. Ricks also talks about the many ways it went wrong for the U.S. in the aftermath of the Iraq war. “I think in one way or another, we, the United States, are stuck in the Middle East in a way that few of us anticipated,” he says. “Ö We are the dog that caught the car. ??? We may just be there for decades.”
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PBS Frontline – As staff writer for The Washington Post, Dana Priest covers intelligence and the Pentagon. She is the author of The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America’s Military. In this interview, she talks about Donald Rumsfeld, his management of the Iraq war and its aftermath, and the challenges confronting the military in a post-9/11 world. Says Priest,”The military is incredibly overstretched. Barring a miracle and some unforeseen trend, you have great instability and the Iraqi government trying to get on its feet. And the last thing the United States would want is some pocket of that to become a safe haven ??? that allows an Al Qaeda-like organization to live and organize in.”

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PBS Frontline – Walter Slocombe is former director of national security and defense in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. organization charged with overseeing Iraq’s reconstruction and transition to democratic rule. He also served in the Pentagon as under-secretary of defense for policy,1994 to 2001. In this interview, he talks about what wasn’t planned for in the aftermath of the war and describes the challenges in training Iraqi security forces following the almost total disappearance of the Iraqi Army. “I wasn’t completely surprised,” he says. “I think the central issue why the army disappeared is that it was a conscript army. Ö The officers lost most of the control of their troops, and sometimes the will to try to control them.”
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PBS Frontline – As deputy secretary of defense in the mid-to-late 1990s, John Hamre was involved in reconstruction planning for Kosovo and Bosnia. He now is president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an organization that has studied every post-war reconstruction task since World War II. In May 2003 the Pentagon asked him and a CSIS team to go to Iraq and evaluate what the U.S. was facing in the aftermath of the war. In this interview, Hamre describes the range of challenges they saw and talks about whether the transformational concepts being pursued by the military today can handle them. “I think we’re really having to struggle with a new and much more complicated problem. The security dimension is more diffuse and more complex. It doesn’t neatly fit the way we’ve structured this brilliant military of ours.”

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Defense and the National Interest – William Lind feels the US should exit Iraq soon after elections in January.
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PBS Frontline – A tank commander in Desert Storm and currently a Senior Military Fellow at the Institute of National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, Col. Douglas MacGregor (U.S. Army-Ret.) is a well-known maverick in the military establishment and the author of Breaking the Phalanx, a book on how to reform the Army. Donald Rumsfeld read some of his ideas and as the Pentagon was formulating its war plan, he was invited to consult with military officials. “They brought me in and said: ‘We’re looking at Iraq. The chief of staff of the Army says it will take at least 560,000 troops.’ Well, of course I burst out laughing immediately, because those are more troops than we have in the active component. Secondly, the Iraqi enemy was always so weak. Why would you want that many forces?”

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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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