A modest proposal: Fire all of the post 9/11 generals
We need to rebuild the ranks of the senior officer corps with members of a new generation who know where we went wrong — and do it now.
Andrew J. Bacevich is the President of the Quincy Institute. He grew up in Indiana, graduated from West Point and Princeton, served in the army, became an academic, and is now a writer. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books, among them: The New America Militarism (2005), The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008), Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010), America’s War for the Greater Middle East (2016), and The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (January 2020). He is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and has held fellowships at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin.
We need to rebuild the ranks of the senior officer corps with members of a new generation who know where we went wrong — and do it now.
The entire American foreign-policy establishment has succumbed to a monumentally self-destructive ideological post-Cold War fever.
Expect the military officials who commanded Afghanistan to invoke ‘cutting and running.’ Let’s talk about why they failed.
If Biden clings to a calcified and militarized conception of national security — as he appears intent on doing — he will put his entire presidency at risk.