Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Part of it is the problem with the tactical mentality that you probably came up with and that I came up with, which is this can do attitude that like, you know, give me a wall and I'll run through it or get over it, but the wall won't stop me, which informs so much of the thinking and mentality of our small units.
That's a great way through a bar fight.
It's even not a bad way through a firefight. It's not really a good way through a war.
Less than 1% of the country went to Afghanistan and Iraq. If you do the numbers out, less than 10% of the population were families of those people and immediately affected and committed to the wars.
Should we really be waging war with 10% of the population involved or paying attention?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Modern War Institute podcast. I'm John Amble, editorial director at MWI. And in this episode, MWI's Major Jake Maroldi talks to award winning New York Times journalist and best selling author CJ Chivers.
His newest book, the Fighters, takes on the task of telling the story of America's post 911 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the eyes of the men and women who fought them.
Before embarking on his career as a writer, Chivers was an infantry officer in the Marine Corps.
That perspective comes through in his writing and in this discussion.
He set out to tell the story not strictly of the policymakers war, or even the general officers war, but of the lieutenants war, the sergeants war, and the soldiers war. Before we get to the conversation, as always, just a couple quick notes. First, if you aren't yet following MWI on social media, find us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It's a great way to get in touch and give us feedback, which we love and, and also to stay up to date on the new articles, podcast episodes and research we're releasing every day. And lastly, of course, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and don't represent those at West Point, the Army or any other agency of the U.S. government.
All right, here's Jake Moralde and C.J. chivers.
[00:02:15] Speaker C: Mr. Chivers, welcome. Thank you for sitting down and taking the time to talk to us.
I want to lead in kind of big and General about your latest book, the Fighters. And I'm curious what the genesis of this project was. Your book, the Gun talked a lot about sort of military innovation and this is a much more personal, I guess, sort of book. So I'm curious what the, what the genesis of this project was.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: So I was present at the attacks on 911 and was propelled, like a lot of Americans overseas, to Afghanistan and then to Iraq from 2001 to 2003. And across the years that followed, I met all sorts of service members in all sorts of circumstances.
And as a journalist, we were tending to write in the moment. And over the course of a decade, I realized I wanted to write something more comprehensive than that.
And my job at the Times had largely been not to cover the strategy, but to cover the troops and the tactics and the ideas that were playing out on the ground at the small unit level.
And I decided to select a cast of characters that maybe could make the arc of that experience as experienced by our military cohere. And, you know, in between two bound covers.
[00:03:29] Speaker C: Okay, so the idea was taking your experience, having worked at the Times and being at that ground level, and fleshing out in a way that maybe connoted themes or gave us an idea about what the reality of fighting in these wars was about. Is that kind of the general thought?
[00:03:49] Speaker A: No, I'm going to quarrel with that a little because it wasn't really my experience.
I'm not in the book. Except for the preface where I declare a point of view, I vanish entirely from the book. Even though I was present at many of the scenes and observed firsthand many of the things that are described in the book, I opted to leave myself out of it entirely. I wanted to capture the troops human experience, and I wanted to do it in a way that if I stitched together a sampling of our service members from different phases and places and times, that a reader could see how the war felt for those fighting it and how it changed over time. Because, as you know, everything changed. The enemies changed, the tactics changed, the doctrines changed, the locations changed. And I wanted to capture some of that so that people who cared to read about these wars would be able to get kind of the low level experience in one book.
[00:04:45] Speaker C: So your book has. It's six folks, right? It's six people from different. Yeah, from Iraq and Afghanistan, primarily, kind of across time, as you said. Of all the stories that you heard in your reporting over the course of the two wars, why these six? What stood out about them? And what about them was either demonstrative of the story you wanted to tell or indicative of the way that these wars were prosecuted?
[00:05:09] Speaker A: So the selection of six meant the elimination of hundreds. I met all sorts of people with all sorts of illustrative or remarkable experiences, but I needed to narrow them down so they would be distinct from each other. So I wanted to capture for the reader many of the, let's call them, particular or idiosyncratic experiences of the wars. Being in an ambush from both sides, encountering an ied, treating a casualty, being a casualty yourself, trying to work with the partner forces, which the conventional forces found very, very frustrating. The difference between invasion and occupation, the difference between straight occupation in the early sense and counterinsurgency. And so I selected experiences or characters who I thought that individually gave us a large set of the most common experiences of the wars. So basically think of them as an ensemble, like, you know, or a garage band. Right? So six different people playing different instruments, doing different things, but hopefully making a coherent sound.
[00:06:21] Speaker C: So in doing that, did you find.
What were the major differences you found between a story of, say, like a specialist Soto, who's in Korengal, and, you know, Americans have been there for a few years and were kind of in occupation mode as opposed to, you know, somebody in the initial invasion of Iraq. What were the differences that you saw in those stories and how do you go about fleshing those out in the book?
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Mostly I saw commonalities. I mean, people are assigned missions. And the book is in some ways about competence and commitment of our lower and middle rank, you know, the people who actually fight and experience and live these wars. It's about their competence and commitment hooked up to larger ideas in which they had no control, and eventually to drift. Mission creep and drift.
But while a soldier's experience in the invasion may be much different than a soldier's experience in, say, late occupation, like Soto had, they in many sense were the same people dealing with the same problems, different enemies, maybe different circumstances, but applying themselves in a very similar fashion. So across the characters, I found that they had much in common, even though they were on very different stages in different phases of the war.
[00:07:45] Speaker C: You mentioned the commonalities of, you know, just different people doing similar things in different phases. What did you view as those. As those commonalities? You're talking sort of about the soldier experience or about the larger kind of
[00:07:59] Speaker A: operations, soldier personality and Persona, the can do attitude. And mostly, and this is maybe a strange word to outsiders who aren't familiar with war, but the place that love played in it. I mean, their commitment to each other. And very often the war became for the people fighting it, about the team or the squad or the platoon and the immediate mission. What you said in our offline conversation before this, the doing the to do, you know, the list of things that a unit has to do each day to function as a unit in the field. And for most of the people I met, it didn't get much larger than that once things got rolling.
Sure.
[00:08:44] Speaker C: So in that, you know, is that a function of. In your mind, given the experiences that you've had, just sort of the nature of, you know, lowest level ground combat, or is there something else that you think played into that?
[00:08:59] Speaker A: I'd say it's both. So certainly I think this is common to people who are fighting war at the lower ranks, because it takes all your bandwidth to live in an outpost and fight from an outpost and patrol from an outpost, or to fly medevac missions from your helipad. It takes everything you have to do that. You don't have a lot of time to follow the larger doctrinal questions all the way up to following the presidential election of 2004 or 2008, which could have a profound effect on your future. Most of the people I know couldn't follow. I think that's common to all wars.
However, I would also say that as the wars went adrift, I think that people focused on the small stuff because it was a little bit easier than trying to grasp what became a very frustrating puzzle.
[00:09:51] Speaker C: I think it's interesting you bring that up. We were talking before recording here. I personally was in Afghanistan at about the same time as several people in the book.
And that discussion of, as you said, the lowest level just sort of being the nature of fighting out of an outpost and just being with your soldiers all the time and focused on that level without a lot of ability to look outside of that.
But I do remember, even as a lieutenant, being vaguely aware of sort of the larger shifts, the folks that you write about, especially in Afghanistan.
We were in a transient period in terms of the operational plan and sort of larger strategic framework. And I feel like you. Do you have visibility on that in the little bit that you can, but
[00:10:42] Speaker A: you can't influence, but you can influence when you don't have the energy to try.
[00:10:46] Speaker C: Right. And I'm curious where you see that playing out. I mean, let's talk to in the book a little bit. But where you saw that sort of feeling, that vague awareness of what's happening above you without the ability to touch it in a meaningful way?
[00:11:03] Speaker A: I'll tell you one place it played out for me psychically was in my own head, because. So I'm turning 54 this year. I was in the Marine Corps, signed up in the 80s, and was an infantry officer in the late 80s and 90s. And throughout my experience across these wars.
My peers were my friends, in some cases my peers, my cohort more broadly, were actually running the wars at the ground level. In Iraq, they were battalion commanders.
In Afghanistan, in the period where we really committed to Afghanistan during the first term of the Obama administration, they were past battalion command and they had brigade level jobs and G3 jobs. They were actually, in many ways, you know, the gears that made the doc that converted the doctrine into tactics they were running. And I used to think a lot at their level and talk a lot with them, both professionally and socially, while I was at the same time really committed to trying to experience the war and write about the war alongside lieutenants and warrant officers and specialists and lance corporals.
And so I always, or often anyhow, was of two heads trying to imagine how you convert the doctrine and lines of operations into actual actions on the ground and then being with the people doing the actions on the ground and trying to often ask myself what I might do differently. And I came to, and I didn't cover the more senior people in the book because I thought they've have more outlets of expression. They are connected to the larger PAO apparatus. Many of them are generals now and they can articulate their own experience because they have all sorts of instruments of amplification for that. So I wanted to capture the people who don't have that access to voice.
But I often felt, even as I was frustrated and angry at some of my own friends, a great deal of empathy for them because I would imagine, had I stayed in being in the similar job, what I might do differently. And I could see that there really wasn't much they could do differently because they were as locked in, in some ways as the corporals on squads were.
[00:13:21] Speaker C: Yeah. So in a lot of ways, what you, what you were seeing was not, it wasn't bad faith, it wasn't malign intent, it was just that people are doing what they, what they have to do. Right.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: So let's say you came as a battalion commander to Afghanistan or Iraq in 2007.
So we had some real fighting on in 2007 in Afghanistan and tremendous fighting in Iraq during the surge.
We had been trained as young officers to be free thinking, independent minded, to apply our tactics to the principles of war. And we were told we came up in a military that was not as hierarchical, that we could, you know, you remember the whole maneuver warfare conversation, Right. That we could influence the battlefield in our way, applying our training and our intellect and our energy to it.
But for those battalion commanders, that wasn't really the case, they inherited a set of outposts often or in an operation area that they had a box that they had to stay within.
And the process of staffing those outposts that maybe they didn't even think were well placed or much less well conceived, they had to put their companies and their platoons out there, and then they had to guard those places. And then they had to have QRFs ready.
And then meanwhile, they're doing the KLE and the lines of operations that came, you know, with the counterinsurgency doctrine. So how much latitude do they have left really, to influence the battlefield? Could a colonel go to, say, blessing the big camp in the Pech Valley where he had to use maybe his best company to hold down the Korengal? Could a colonel go there and say, I'm going to reorder the whole battlefield? No, you had to keep those posts.
And so in some ways, it will anger some people to say this, but my view of it was that the colonel didn't really have that much more power than the sergeant.
[00:15:14] Speaker C: So in doing these interviews, again, I think what is important to get to is some of the big themes, some of the big takeaways. What should we glean from the experiences of the soldiers in your book? Like you said, you give your opinion, sort of your overarching thesis in the preface of the book. I'm curious if there on top of that, are any big takeaways.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: So I'm unashamed and unapologetic about my takeaway, so I'll have no trouble staying stating it here for the people who haven't read the preface. I'm a skeptic. I think on our own terms as a country and as a military, the wars did not achieve what their organizers said they would achieve. I think that's inarguable, with a few exceptions, like the killing of Osama bin Laden, which was just.
But many of the other things we tried to do didn't work, and they're still not working. And many of them were even counterproductive.
Now let's stop that thought and talk about what the book's really about. Against that backdrop, all sorts of good people showed up in good faith and tried to do their best.
The takeaway is that we as a country and our military as its senior leadership needs a strategy and needs not to be so vulnerable to mission creep and drift that we have good people who will give their all. And we need to connect them to realistic goals.
And by realistic, I mean achievable.
Both, in fact, and within a reasonable amount of time so that this military is applied more usefully and more morally to the national security tasks that are given it. And I think in many ways as a country we have failed not at the sergeant level, which is really where the book is about basically sergeants and people near sergeants.
I hold that cohort of our population in enormously high esteem. I also think they were misapplied and misused by people who should have known better. And the takeaway maybe is if you read the book and consider those experiences against the backdrop in which they occurred, that you can help participate in having us find a more sound strategy and direction.
[00:17:39] Speaker C: And you mentioned when we were talking before that that strategic direction, the overarching purpose driving why soldiers, why sergeants are out there doing the things that they need to do as well, as you observed, and I think a lot of people have observed over the course of the war where tactical level commanders and soldiers are doing well. They're doing the things that they need to do. They are doing their job as they need to do it.
We had discussed earlier what the genesis where the root cause of that is. And I'm curious sort of what you think the root cause of the lack of strategic or operational coherence is.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: I can point to a lot of causes that together form the root. Think of the root as like a web, not like one big tap root.
Part of it is the problem with the technical mentality that you probably came up with and that I came up with, which is this can do attitude that like, you know, give me a wall and I'll run through it or get over it, but the wall won't stop me, which informs so much of the thinking and mentality of our small units.
That's a great way through a bar fight.
It's even not a bad way through a firefight. It's not really a good way through a war. Like when you're hooked up to something that's not going to work, you end up reinforcing failure, which we saw bright eyed good people having to do again and again.
Other causes have to do with the absolute, and I'll say it, shameful separation between the military and the body politic, the military and the larger public.
I trace some of this drift back to the end of conscription and I have an odd argument for that that people may quarrel with, and I enjoy the quarrel, but I feel this in my bones that when we did away with conscription we disconnected the population from the war. And when we had, or if we had these wars connected to mail lottery, where anyone who had a niece or nephew or son or daughter or grandchild had to worry about them being drafted to go serve in these wars, then I think that our population would be engaged and our population would engage their congressional representatives and the executive branch, and we would have much more accountability and input in our strategy. What we have instead is the separation of the fighting class from the rest of the country. Country, the fighting class actually has no political clout. Less than 1% of the country went to Afghanistan and Iraq. If you do the numbers out, less than 10% of the population were families of those people and immediately affected and committed to the wars.
Should we really be waging war with 10% of the population involved or paying attention?
I think it's a recipe for uninformed consent. And uninformed consent, I think, contributes to the. What we just talked about, an absence of a realistic strategy.
[00:20:56] Speaker C: How do we extrapolate some of that out into the current conflicts? Now, obviously, Iraq and Afghanistan are still current conflicts, but the mission set that the military is being asked to deal with has expanded quite a lot. I tell people's story fairly often where my younger brother graduated from VMI, and in 2012, his unit was already in Afghanistan or was in Iraq. And he said, hey, they're giving me the option to go. It's only three months left in their deployment. And I said, you better go, because deployments are ending. Like, you gotta get that right shoulder patch.
And boy, was I wrong.
You know, we are as an army especially, but as a military more generally, everywhere, doing lots of different things all the time.
And I'm curious how you see some of those big takeaways that you articulated being extrapolated out to these conflicts that we find ourselves in in the last five or six years, as opposed to maybe the last 15 or 20 years.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: So the wars have changed. Obviously, they continue, but at a different scale and with often a slightly different list of tasks and a less ambitious list in some cases.
Although the air. That certainly doesn't apply to the air war or the air to ground war over the territory held by the Islamic State, I can apply this very directly. It's the same problem. I think if you and me walked out of here now and went into a diner and started polling the people eating their breakfast about what they think we're doing in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and elsewhere, that we would struggle, even though we could do this within a mile of West Point, we would struggle to find anyone who can give a coherent description.
I think that it's the same problem that we just described that as a government, we have not articulated and vetted the strategy that the country, our country is invested in and can express.
And that is not to say everything we're doing is wrong. You haven't heard me, and you won't hear me critique a lot of the CT mission. Right? That's a little bit different. And it always was throughout. Even in Afghanistan, there's like the CT track, the counterterrorism, I should say, for people who don't know the acronym, the counterterrorism track versus, let's call it the occupation or counterinsurgency or FID tracks.
And that continues now at the counterterrorism mission. And I'm not critiquing that the same way I'm critiquing the larger use of the conventional forces, but it's the same problem. I mean, who among even your peers do you think could sit down and write on two sheets of paper exactly what we're doing and why and what the timeline is, what the goals are and what the timeline is to realize those goals?
I bet you there's no one in this building that could do that.
[00:23:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I would buy that.
So I guess my question is, so what are the. Given the takeaways and given what we're experiencing in our current conflicts.
Not that you're necessarily in the business of giving advice, but what would be. If I were a senior military official or a policymaker reading the fighters, how should that change the way that I understand what I'm doing in terms of formulating policy or strategy?
How would you like, if I'm a policymaker reading the fighters, somebody to read it and turn that into action in some sort of way? Again, that might be a big. It might be too big a question, but no, it's.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: It's actually, it's kind of easy because as a matter of principle and practice, I always say that I.
And there's. I don't always. There's occasionally an exception, but I almost always say that I do. Description, not prescription. It's not my job to define the strategy or recommend it. And even when you hear me make recommendations, it's about more engagement, so we have more minds applied to the strategy and more informed consent about the strategy. I don't have specific recommendations for anyone about how to wage these wars. Besides, if you care to read the fighters and books like the Fighters that you enrich, your understanding of the wars and its costs, and you participate in solutions towards a real strategy, that's it. I'm not a strategist, and it's really not my role as a reporter, as a reporter in this case, or a historian or a journalist, or in some ways a participant. Because I walked many of the patrols that are in the book, I would offer a narrower recommendation, which is merely that we need to understand the wars.
So in some ways, think of me as like the oil pressure or temperature light on the dashboard of your car. The light goes off, it doesn't tell you how to fix your car. It tells you you might want to pull over and think about what you're doing.
[00:25:54] Speaker C: All right, the last question I have, I always ask this one because we are here at West Point, and I think your book in particular is directly valuable for our cadet population here.
What advice would you give cadets? Or what would you like our cadets or soon to be lieutenants that reside here at West Point to take away?
Or what advice do you have for them?
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Oh, well, if I gave the advice, you'd probably reach across the table and bounce my head off the floor. For promoting what some people would mistake as insubordination.
I say serve your ideals, serve your belief.
Try to figure out what's right more than serving your career. Very simple. Doesn't mean don't listen to the boss, because to a certain degree, everyone has to.
But try to ask yourself why you're serving what you can do that is actually helpful in your service, and listen to that more than to the system that promotes you.
[00:26:55] Speaker C: Great.
Mr. Chivers, thank you so much for talking to us.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: Thank you for having me here.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: Hey, thanks again for listening to the MWI podcast. Before you go, hopefully you're already subscribed to the podcast. If not, you can find us on itunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please take just a couple quick moments and leave us a rating or give us a review. It really is a huge help in getting the word out to new listeners.
All right, thanks again.
