School of War - ‘We Are Going to War’: H.R. McMaster Remembers 9/11

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster was on the phone with the Pentagon when the plane struck the building on September 11, 2001. “I thought, Okay, we are going to war,” he recalls. Twenty-five years after 9/11, McMaster joins Aaron MacLean to discuss the wars that followed. Drawing on his experience as a wartime commander and national security adviser, McMaster explains why he considers Afghanistan a self-defeat, how American withdrawal helped enable the rise of ISIS in Iraq, and why he thinks the latest Iran ceasefire was “a big mistake.” 4:39 McMaster on 9/11 7:27 Adapting to Iraq 12:33 Lessons From Iraq 15:13 Counterinsurgency’s Legacy 21:19 The Post-9/11 Wars 23:23 Afghanistan’s “Self-Defeat” 25:07 When America Leaves 29:53 Sustaining Afghanistan 32:14 Defending the Afghan Mission 35:37 The Axis of Aggressors 44:41 Trump’s Messaging About the War 49:07 Politics in the Military This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. This episode of School of War is also brought to you by Stratolaunch, a leading pure-play hypersonics company. Stratolaunch helps the U.S. and its allies move new hypersonic technologies from concept to capability, faster and cheaper. Learn more about how Stratolaunch is accelerating the future of hypersonics at Stratolaunch.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the front line today. Maven Smart System isn't just software you use. It's the platform you build on. Every day, thousands of uniformed service members use AI coding agents to build their own agentic applications across all warfighting functions on top of the DOW's integrated ontology. What once took a contract in a year, now takes a warfighter and an afternoon. Administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. One platform deployed everywhere at all classifications.

Build at the speed of war. It's been 25 years since September the 11th, 2001. That day changed my life, as it did, I assume, the lives of many who listened to this show. I wasn't in New York or Washington when the attacks occurred, and I didn't personally lose anyone in them, though my father is and was at the time at Arlington Cemetery, his resting place, all but a stone's throw from where American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. So I did always take that personally. That all said, the major effect on my life in which I definitely did lose friends,

was in the wars that followed the 9-11 attacks in Afghanistan and in Iraq principally. That's what my guest, H.R. McMaster, and I are going to discuss today, those wars and their legacy. It's also just about the fifth anniversary of the School of War podcast, and H.R. was our very first guest, a few of you may recall. In some ways, today's episode is an extension of that very first conversation, and a good example of what I'm trying to do here at School of War. Make sense of our violent time, of the forces that created it, and to work out, where everything is headed as best as we can. Let's get into it. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today. Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. He is the Fuad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a distinguished visiting fellow at Arizona State University. He is the host of today's battlegrounds. He's a regular on Goodfellows. As you know, sir, it's your podcast affiliations that are the most important. And you had this 34-year career in the Army and were National Security Advisor to the President of the United States.

We'll get to all of that. Most importantly of all, of course, you were the very first guest on the School of War podcast almost exactly five years ago. Thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for coming back. Aaron, hey, thanks. And thanks for everything you're doing to educate the American people, international audiences about war and warfare. And congratulations on the tremendous success in the podcast. It's been awesome to watch, and I'm a big fan. We are having a good run here, and it's been amazing to watch it grow and very gratifying. So this is probably five years is probably enough time past. It's probably the right time for me to break it to you what your numbers were,

which is really to say what my numbers were for the very first episode. But we turned in the stunning statistic of 77 people downloaded that episode that day. But don't worry, because over the course of the following seven days, a further 140 downloaded it. So, you know, we doubled in the week, so it can't be all bad, right? We moved a little bit. Don't worry, this episode will get a few more than that. Too funny.

Well, it was great to be there at the start. I refer people back to that conversation. It was a really good start to the show. And we spent a lot of time on, well, really on your youth, your experiences as a troop leader of Eagle Troop in the Gulf War. this famous tank engagement you were involved in. It's an audio-only episode, but it's really worth your time to the listeners if you have time to go back and take a look at it. Today, as we are, the fifth anniversary of the show is pretty close here to the 25th anniversary of 9-11. I thought

I would start us there. You were, if I'm not mistaken, also in a command position. on 9-11. And if I am mistaken, tell me exactly what your billet was. I was a commander of the first squadron, fourth United States cavalry, which was a division cavalry squadron of the first infantry division. And a formation we don't have anymore, which is terrible, by the way,

because cavalry squadrons and regiments, I think, is exactly kind of what we need. Obviously, configured much differently from when they were back then. But we were in Germany. We were training at the Hohenfelds training area. We had a little break in between what we call, called a heavy light rotation and our squadron rotation.

We did this rotation through the training center with the 173rd Airborne Brigade out of Vincenza. Fantastic training, but right in the middle of that is when 9-11 happened. And of course, what that did is just added kind of an explanation point to our training to prepare for combat because even though we did not deploy as a unit after 9-11 immediately, almost every one of our soldiers did deploy to combat. combat later. When you saw what had happened, it must have been the afternoon for you out there in Germany, you saw the attacks on New York, you saw the attack on the Pentagon. Do you remember, I mean, what were your thoughts about what this meant for the Army, for your soldiers, for you personally?

Like, what were the first impressions back there on the day? Well, of course, initially, I mean, it looked like obviously a mass murder terrorist attack, you know. I was actually on the phone to the G1 office of the Army in the Pentagon when the attack hit the Pentagon on that same ring. Killing the Army G1 and I heard the commotion in the background on the other end of the phone.

Of course, my duty officer had already just come in and told me the two planes had hit the World Trade Center. So I thought, okay, hey, we are going to war against probably, you know, probably Al-Qaeda, you know, because I was just paying attention what's going on in the world. I knew al-Qaeda had already committed one bombing of the World Trade Center with a truck bomb. And in 94, I think it was, I think, Aaron, maybe 93, I think. And then, you know, declared war on the United States.

You know, our response had been to fire a few cruise missiles under the Clinton administration and call it a day. but of course what you know our enemies don't go away because we uh you know we we ignore that and so you know you've spent your career up to this point as a cavalry officer i mean you've done some teaching at west point you've had some other interesting assignments um the war in which you'll eventually you know become directly involved because you're not involved in the initial invasions of afghanistan or iraq but you end up in a command position in a very you know interesting dangerous time in Iraq at sort of the peak of the insurgency. Talk about the evolution of

your own thinking as a military leader and as a military thinker as well from the sort of more traditional big army cavalry armor tactics and operations that you were steeped in up to that point, to the kind of war that became required to fight back against the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, both by the time you got into a command roll there, but you also, you were on the, the CENTCOM commander's staff, right, before you took commands back in the 2003-ish time frame.

So you got a fair amount of time to sort of observe from a high level before you went into the fight directly. No, hey, it was a great education, you know, about the nature of, and the character, I guess, of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the time of the invasion, of re-invasion of Iraq, 2003,

the mass invasion of Iraq, of Iraq. I was a fellow at the Hoover Institution in lieu of the war college. And I had just finished writing a long monograph for your viewers. It's a real page turner called Cracking the Foundation,

defense transformation, and the underlying assumption of dominant knowledge in future war. So I was thinking about future war, and I was criticizing the orthodoxy of the revolution in military affairs, right? This belief that new technology especially those associated with surveillance technologies, big data analytics, and precision strike capabilities,

would make the next war fundamentally different from all wars that had gone before it. The next war, if anybody even had the temerity to challenge the United States, because remember we had all these phrases at the time, full spectrum dominance, right? Dominant battle space knowledge. You couldn't read a sentence in a concept for future war that didn't have the word dominance in it. You know, and so it was supristic, I thought, and I thought it was incompatible with the enduring nature of war, war as an extension of politics, war as human, war as uncertain, war as a contest of wills. So I'm criticizing all this, and I think it was this orthodoxy of the RMA, the Revolution Military Affairs, that was a setup, a setup for a lot of the difficulties that we experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wars that were always going to be difficult.

But I think in both those wars, we made it just about as hard on ourselves as we could because we were always looking, you know, for the exit, right? We're always looking to, you know, for withdrawing. And that short-term approach to long-term problems actually, I believe, lengthened those wars and made them more costly. I had the benefit of serving on General Abizaid staff. He was a Sankom commander. You know, I lobbied to get there as the war was kicking off to live.

leave my fellowship early, which I did, arrived in Gunner to be his, initially his executive officer, which I was ill-suited for. You know, Joe Adams and he said, you know, HR, you're the worst ex-o I've ever had. And I said, sir, it reflects poorly on your judgment that you gave me the job to begin with. Because you knew I didn't have the fawning nature, you know, to be a good ex-o. So he made me his, his initiatives group or advisory group leader, you know, and I learned so much, from him, but from every brigade commander, the brigade in Afghanistan and the multiple brigades in Iraq, which I visited multiple times over that year. I saw, you know, things, you know, units that were doing particularly well.

Unitsom maybe weren't doing as well and began to understand why. And so I took that, that, what I learned there, and applied it to the training of the third cavalry regiment when I took command of that regiment in 2004. So, Sentcom, 2003 to 4, where I had. observed what was initially in Iraq a localized decentralized hybrid uncertainty. I watched it coalesced it graft on to elements of the former regime, you know, the former Mukabarad or intelligence substructure, you know, of the Iranian state, the bathist regime, grafted onto it this Tafirist or Salafi jihadist element that came with Zarqawi and al-Qaeda in Iraq. And so I get an

appreciation for the nature of this evolving enemy, the nature of the evolving situation, and was able to bring that to our training, the training of the regiments. We prepared to deploy in less than a year. I mean, the regiment returned in February of 2004, and we deployed back to Iraq in February 2005. And so what were the units that you were observing that were doing a good job when you had your position on the advisory group versus the units that were doing a bad job. What were the particular lessons, the most important ones, at least, that you then worked into your training as a new commander? Well, I'll tell you, I think that the brigades in Mosul and the 101 with 1st Airborne Division

is this is John Petrae's division at the time. I mean, they were particularly effective in what could have been really a hotbed of the insurgency and later became one, yeah, after we withdrew forces prematurely from that area and created space for al-Qaeda in Iraq, along with a lot of the political decisions by the Iraqi government. I mean, there's a long story. But I mean, I think the brigades in the Mosul and Ninawa province area, they did a lot of things that were very effective. In building Iraqi security forces, they focused on leader development, I think, in a very effective way. The development of junior officers in particular for those Iraqi army units.

Hey, Jim Hickey's brigade colonel Jim Hickey of the fourth. Infantry Division, who was in, you know, Saddam's birthplace to crit, those guys did a fantastic job. I thought in terms of counterinsurgency and dealing with this nascent insurgency in a very effective way. I think some of the units that had these astounding problem sets, my good friend Joel Armstrong, Lieutenant Colonel, commander of a Cavs squadron in Sutter City, you know. and you know he said I saw him in Stutter City when I traveled there was they come and he goes

Hey HR I did I did the math You know there's one cavalry trooper For about you know every You know 40,000 Indians or something He'll basically make it a metaphor Back to back to the cavalry in the frontier So so you know I saw a lot of commanders who were innovative

And what they were doing to stabilize the situation But you know what I saw overall though Is really the struggle The struggle of the Army having to recognize, hey, we need to do what the armies always had to do in war, which is to take the actions necessary to consolidate military gains into a sustainable political outcome. I mean, everybody kept waiting for like the State Department cavalry. Hey, there is no State Department cavalry. So I think there was a reluctant. The State Department cavalry is in fact

the cavalry. Right. So, hey, it was a, it was a really, you know, important time to be there for my development and learning and be able to apply that to the, the training of our regiment for for our operations in south bagdad and in in western ninawa province 2005 to 2006 is the third cavalry regiment and this is the same period where um uh counterinsurgency theory is being revived um in the army as a service but across the military you know including the marine corps very much so i remember just fearsome debates um about this you know general petraeus becomes very prominent um uh in in in this conference conversation. You yourself become very prominent in it. I remember, you know, I joined the service in 2007,

so a little bit later than the period we're discussing. And I remember John Nagel being invited by the faculty of the Marine Corps' imagery officer's course to come speak to all of us, new lieutenants, and, you know, hearing a talk from him and then sort of looking it up and looking about the debate about the counterinsurgency manual and being struck by how, frankly, vitriolic a lot of the debate was about how everything we were doing and our approach to Iraq and Afghanistan was at best a kind of waste of resources. You know, reflecting now, you know, what do you think the legacy of sort of peak counterinsurgency is within the military or what ought it to be? Well, hey, you know, if you're fighting an insurgency, you've got to counter it. So that's like,

you know, you did a counterinsurgency approach. I think some people, they get confused about like the countercerncy doctrine. Hey, that's not the strategy, right? That's not the operations you're conducting. You know, that's a guideline. It's a way to think about it. And I think it's very consistent with what you want to do and what some people would describe as conventional warfare. You want to seize, you retain, and exploit the initiative, right, to gain a tremendous advantage over your enemy, to win by overmatching your enemy. And if you think about it that way, you have to understand the nature of your enemy. What is it your enemy is trying to achieve?

What is their strategy for achieving it? What are their sources of strength and support? And what are their weaknesses? And then put together, you know, a plan to isolate them from sources, strength and support and attack, relentlessly attack their vulnerabilities. And that's what you're doing. And when you look at it in a surrecy,

what is source of strength? Anonymity, the ability to move in and among a population. How do they do that? By establishing a pall of fear on the population. So what if your tactics has to be to lift that ball of fear, right, to gain access to human intelligence so you can go after that enemy effectively, you know, for example? You want to isolate them from sources of ideological and psychological support. And you do that by clarifying your own intentions, carrying the enemy's disinformation,

exposing the enemy's brutality and criminality, and tracing the population's grievances back to the people who are creating it like the terrorists, right? So, I mean, some people thought, well, countercertaincy is kind of a fluffy thing. It doesn't mean, no, there's nothing about counterstirity. It doesn't say that you don't pursue and destroy your enemy, right? That's part of it. But it's very important to counter uncertainty to continue to obviously overmatch the enemy in every tactical engagement.

Nobody wants a fair fight in combat, right? I mean, fair fights have ugly outcomes, even if you win. You want an unfair fight, but you want to oppose. firepower with discipline and discrimination. Because every time you don't do that, from a John Stewart-Mill perspective, you know, it's counterproductive. You're kind of working for the enemy. Beyond violating your professional military ethic, you know, which from a Kantian perspective, a Judeo-Christian perspective, our professional military ethic is you treat man as an ends, and you distinguish, right? You discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. So, hey, I think

our preparation for our regiment took all that into account, you know, and we were relentless in pursuit of the enemy. But we did so in such a way that we isolated them from the population, not only physically, but psychologically and emotionally. You know, and you know, we do, we do it one when we have, we unmanned aerial system is observing a particular neighborhood that had been, you know, kind of the base of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sarai neighborhood of Tullafir. And we see, and it starts to dig a hole to put in an IED. And an older woman comes out with a broomstick and starts beating them over the head and shoulders with a broomstick. You know, okay.

Now we want, now the ball of fear is off, right? These people are isolated. And, of course, we developed the human intelligence networks to prevent them from coming back in the city, everything else, while we developed indigenous security forces to provide for enduring security. Now, of course, you know, that was transitory, it turns out, based in law. large measure on our complete disengagement from Iraq prematurely in 2010, and the policies of the Maliki, Shia-dominated government that recreated the impression among Sunni communities that they're going to be eviscerated at the hands of their own government and security forces,

which then incentivize them to begin again to look at al-Qaeda-related groups, now ISIS, as patrons and protectors of these beleaguered communities. That's what jumpstarted the return of large-scale sectarian violence and the return of al-Qaeda and the new guys under the guise of ISIS in those subsequent years, 2012-13. This episode of School of War is brought to you

by Maven Smart System, administered by OSWCDAO powered by the Palantir platform. Maven isn't an app. It's a builder ecosystem. Right now across the joint force, thousands of uniform service members are pointing AI coding agents at their hardest problems and building the tools they need themselves, targeting workflows, intel products, battle management.

No ticket, no vendor, no wait. The warfighter closest to the fight is now the one building for it. That's how you fight at the speed of war. I want to ask you a question about the big picture legacy of our post-9-11 wars. I mean, I completely agree that it is too often over-level. looked that we defeated the insurgency in Iraq. I personally missed Iraq. I was only Afghanistan myself. But we, for all intents and purposes, defeated the major elements of the insurgency in Iraq before snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by departing, setting the stage for ISIS,

for more Iranian influence for all kinds of bad stuff. That said, stepping back, I do want your thoughts on everything that has happened. happened since 9-11, in particular in terms of our military and strategic affairs, because there are a lot of people on both left and right, and I confess I'm somewhat sympathetic to the case, depending on how it's made, that C. It is not a particularly happy story. We have the mixed legacy of Iraq, of a hard-fought, hard-won victory that took many years at some cost, only ultimately not really to matter as much as it should have. We have an outright defeat in Afghanistan, plenty of operational success along the way.

But to me, you know, it's interesting, and I'd be happy to justify this at greater length if you're interested. But to me, Afghanistan, at least where I was, is the story of the counterinsurgency theory that had been successfully applied in Iraq being ported over to a country where the tradition of central government

was so weak that it just didn't graft on very easily. And something more decentralized may have made more sense. We can talk more about that if you're curious. But, you know, so, mixed legacy in Iraq, ultimate defeat in Afghanistan, failure to position for Russian and Chinese expansionism, which of course is one of your major themes. And then obviously in Iran that, you know, whatever it was over this period wasn't disempowered and is very much a problem we're dealing with today. So the overall report card from Bush administration to Obama administration, say those 16 years,

you know, doesn't look so great to a lot of people. And I'm curious what your take on the overall legacy is. Well, I think the difficulties we encounter both places, when you call it an ultimate defeat, I would call it a self-defeat in Afghanistan, is based in large measure on, I think, an extraordinary degree of strategic incompetence, incompetence based on ignorance about the nature of war in particular. In Afghanistan, when I first came into the Trump administration in 2017, I tell this story pretty extensively in my memoir of that time. You know, I told President Trump, hey, this has not been a 20-year war. There's been a one-year war fought 20 times over. And it was the inconsistency in the strategy that I think created the space for what was initially a defeated Taliban to reconstitute. Guess where? Across the border in Pakistan.

And who helped them? Al-Qaeda. And who helped them the Pakistani ISI. And who helped them the Gulf donors that gave them the cash to reconstitute. And so what happened in Afghanistan, in my view, is an astonishing degree of self-delusion about the nature of the war and the nature of the enemy. We were fighting a transnational terrorist organization that was intertwined with the Akani network, that was intertwined with al-Qaeda, that was supported by our so-called friend, the Pakistanis and the ISI. But what were our assumptions about the nature of war over many of those years, especially I would say from the Obama, administration on when President Obama in 2009, remember, he announces the so-called, you know, the surge

into Afghanistan, and at the same time gives the date for the withdrawal. How the hell does that work? I remember it well. It was my battalion that went. It was first 10-6 Marines to his first out of the door. And you were in Marja probably. You were in the crappiest areas, you know, and a very difficult fight there. And so if war is a contest of wills, how does that work to tell your enemy you're leaving? And then how about the disconnect? between the way we're applying the elements of national power. What was the diplomatic effort at the time? Oh, let's talk to the Taliban, the Taliban political council,

which was always just a shop window for these jackasses, where they could raise money and lie to us through their teeth. And at the same time, town will work into withdrawal. So what you want to do in war is align the instruments of power, so they're mutually reinforcing. We were actually applying the elements of power, what we're trying to achieve politically and diplomatically and militarily doing the opposite of what we should have been doing at the time. So I think that's one example over the years. You know, I mean,

think about what you heard. What did the American people hear from the Biden administration when it was presiding over the disastrous withdrawal and self-defeat, humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan? You know, you heard, oh, you know, the Taliban, they're going to be different. They're going to share power. They're going to treat women much more nicely, right? You know, You heard that the Taliban, there was a bold line between them and other terrorist organizations. You actually had military officers that were to partner with the Taliban against terrorists. Are you kidding me? Right?

And so, you know, I think, obviously, that the disaster is deadly, humility withdrawal, the aftermath. We all know now what the nature of the enemy is, right? The Afghan people certainly know because they've been thrust back into hell. So what I would say to the veterans of that war, you include it, you should be damn proud of what you. did. Because what you can see exposed facto now is you can see what the hell you prevented from happening a return to the

you know, the 96 to 2001 hell of Afghanistan. And at least you showed the Afghan people. There's a different way. And I believe I believe that the Taliban regime is untenable you know, in the long term. I mean, obviously it's sad. The Afghan people are still going through hell. But anyway,

that's how I view Afghanistan. It's different from a lot of people view it. But I'm telling you, that was a self-defeat. If you look at really where we were in the South Asian strategy 2017 and 2018, I mean, Afghanistan was not Denmark,

you know, but it didn't need to be Denmark, right? And we were sustaining that effort with about $22 billion a year, you know, maybe $4,000, 5,000, 6,000 troops, how many Americans really cared how many troops we had there if they weren't burying the part of the fight

and the Afghans were. You know, and so I believe that's a fight that was occurring, you know, on a modern day frontier between barbarism and civilization. And remember what happened, you know, in Iraq. I mean, the same kind of thing. Disengagement.

And you know, hey, guess what? Wars don't end when you just leave. I mean, that's what happened. In Iraq, we disengaged not only militarily but diplomatically. In the election in 2010 in Iraq, Yad alow, he won that election. He won the plurality of the vote. So under the Constitution, he should have gotten the first crack at forming a government. If he had done that, it would have been a relatively secular Shia government with Sunni participants in the coalition.

And if that happens, there's not a return to large-scale sectarian violence. Instead, what happens is the Iranians run an operation inside of the Iraqi government to say, oh, no, it's not the candidate who wins the plurality in election against a forum of the government. It's the sitting prime minister, Maliqi. And so we did even contest that. We're like, oh, that's an Iraqi issue. No, it's not an Iraqi issue to counter Iranian influence in Iraq. And so that set conditions, you know, for the return of al-Qaeda in the form of ISIS, a terrorist organization that immediately recruited 40,000 to the cause, largely from outside the borders of Iraq, inflicted a humanitarian catastrophe on Syria and on Iraq, took over territory the size of Great Britain and became the most deadly terrorist organization in history with about 90-some attacks outside of those borders, right? I mean, you know, shooting down a Russian airliner, the attacks in Brussels in Paris, the inspired attack in San Bernardino.

You know, so the lesson I take out of this, Aaron, is, hey, you know, wars don't end when you disengage. And it's important to conduct those wars in a way that's consistent with the nature of war and to achieve a sustainable political outcome. Our denial about that is what was a setup, I think, for the difficulties, the excessive difficulties. and the failures in those wars. Yeah, and to be clear, I mean, I agree with you. I think those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan ought to be proud of what they did. And there was tremendous amount of success, depending on where you look and what time period is that you're looking. As we mentioned, the Army, the Marine Corps, the U.S. military and its allies defeated the insurgency in Iraq.

In Afghanistan, I was there at the front end, so I didn't really get to see it with my own eyes, but for my little piece of it, I mean, the Marine Corps defeated is probably too strong. sure I could defend that expression, but certainly suppressed the insurgency to a sufficient point where there wasn't a whole lot of violence by, say, 2012, 2013 in the Helmand River Valley. And so one more question about these wars, and then we'll move on to some other subjects. But in terms of sustainable political outcomes in Afghanistan, what seemed to me to be the case was absent direct American intervention, whether that was persistent in the sense that we were we were still walking the streets of these towns, or we had sort of QRF forces position

and ready to go. But absent Americans there or close by and a lot of American money, a lot of what existed outside of places like Kabul was not sustainable by the Afghans alone. I agree with that. I agree with that. Okay, yeah. Would anybody even notice if we were still there? And then if you look at just the amount of equipment we lost on the way out, that's

multiple years of a sustained commitment. And if you look at the $19 billion over the horizon counterterrorism center we built in in gutter. Right. I mean, over the horizon, as you know, counterterrorism, it doesn't really work, right? And so what we did is we had Afghans making the sacrifices, bearing the brunt of that fight. And what we should have done is put more pressure on the Pakistanis. I mean, President Trump started on this path. And then soon after I left his national screen advisor, I saw Imran Khan sitting in the Oval Office.

and my wife heard me yelling from the other room. I was yelling at the television. Like, what the hell is going on? You know? And now we've got, we're using the Pakistanis as mediators again. How do you think that's going to work out? Maybe they were talking about cricket. Yeah.

Yeah. He celebrated the liberation, you know, of Afghanistan and for the fall of Kabul. Emron Cond did, you know, our so-called friend. Yeah, it was never clearly explained to me by those who were enthusiastic about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, at least before it happened, how a terror-narco state in the heart of Central Asia approximate to China was going to improve our strategic position vis-a-vis China rather than weaken it. That was never clear to me. And to me, the sort of regional slash geopolitical argument was always the strongest argument for staying. But then you run into the problem, and this is not a value

judgment for me. This is just an observation about American politics. where you have the reason why you have, you know, first President Obama, at least later in his time in office, then President Trump, then President Biden, you have these presidents and a lot of politicians being elected who are pretty sour on the wars in Afghanistan is because Americans don't like this kind of thing. I take your point that who would even notice,

but one of the reasons why things were quiet towards the end there was because of the diplomatic process. What if the Taliban, like the Iranians, seem like they wanted you now, wanted to keep causing us trouble, keep causing casualties just to make the point that this is an extended operation. It's just, it's hard to sell. It's hard to sell.

I'm telling you, I mean, by 2018, by 2018, the Taliban were reeling by 2018. I mean, Afghans will tell you this. You know, I mean, and what happened is that we, you know, we sent Zalqlalzad there, you know, essentially, I think to negotiate a surrender. I don't know what else to call it. What do you call that thing, you know? I mean, to deliver blow after blow to the Afghans. Yeah, sure, the Afghans needed our support. support. But what do we do? Toward the end of the war, we partnered with the Taliban against the Afghan

government, in my view. We started negotiations without them present. How does that help them out? We forced them to release 10,000 of the most heinous people on earth prisoners as like a goodwill gesture. We gave the Taliban veto power over whether or not we could employ our air power. We couldn't, do can only apply our intelligence and airpower proactively in support of the Afghan national security forces, right? And we listed all the things we wouldn't do to support that. We cut off our intelligence support. We cut off our logistic support. I mean, it was abhorrent what we did.

And we did that all in our own volition, you know. And I think it's a large measure due to this mantra of ending the endless wars. I mean, I think it's nonsense, man. I mean, Americans didn't even know how many truths we had in Afghanistan. You know, we weren't taking casualties. We took more casualties in Korea in the late 60s. You know, in Korea, in the late 60s, then we did in the last couple of years of the war in Afghanistan. You're right.

At the end, we were placating the Taliban, so there weren't attacks on our forces. But this is before that, Aaron. I mean, that we delivered these blows. And, you know, there was this element within government within our intelligence agencies. I mean, the first paper I got from the intelligence agencies on the situation in Afghanistan, said I wrote across the top of it in a sharpie pen, did we outsource this paper to the Taliban? You know, because it was all this, you know, the Taliban is like this romantic, you know, indigenous movement. But nonsense, you know, nonsense.

Romantic. Romantic is not the first word that would have sprung to mind for me. Let's move to Iran then in the current conflict there. One of the things I'm really interested, you know, as you've observed, we had the Iranian president, Pasechian, at the Shanghai cooperation organization. meeting this week, he was going to meet with President Putin. I saw he also had apparently a brief meeting with President Xi. You have been outspoken in your description of and your prescriptions about the so-called axis of aggressors. So Iran, Russia, China, as we just discussed, and then can add North Korea into that mix. How does the war with Iran fit into this broader geopolitical puzzle

as you see it. Well, Iran is a car carrying member of the access of aggressors, right? It has these strategic partnership agreements, essentially alliances, you know, with Russia and China, in which they aid and abet each other, right? I mean, and there's a great study by the Foundation of Defense of Democracy is Brad Bowman and Mark Montgomery put out this great book that really catalogs, like blow by blow, action by action, what they do for each other, you know, and we've got to remember how intertwined they are. I mean, remember at the output. the outset of the onslaught against Ukraine in 2022, what do the Iranians provide? Hey, the Shahed drones, which the Russians have been helping them, you know, improve and through

multiple iterations now. Now they're jet powered. Now they've got better guidance capabilities. They're difficult or impossible to jam, you know. So they're working together on specific capabilities, providing them to one another. Russia provides a lot of military capabilities to the Iranians, especially in the area of air defense. Now, the air defense systems, they don't work very well, it turns out, you know, against F-35s and some of our long-range percent of straight capabilities, but they've been sending

them now a lot of shoulder-fired capabilities. I think that's probably what we lost the aircraft to in northern Iran, for example. But they provide diplomatic cover for each other. And China underwrites really both Russia and China with the electronics and the hardware they need to sustain their war-making machines such as they are. and the economic wherewithal by purchasing of Russian energy, by purchasing of Iranian energy, feeding that ATM, the cash flow that both of them need to stay afloat. And they support each other diplomatically.

Remember when Iran lit the ring of fire around Israel on October 7, 2023, who hosted Hamas leadership 48 hours later? Hey, Vladimir Putin, right? I mean, so whenever we pretend they're separate from each other, when we ask China, oh, hey, just do us a solid, you know, and constrain the Iranians. We're playing into their hands because they aid in a bet one another. So I think what we should be doing at this moment is not trying to separate them, not trying to separate Russia from China and Iran, glue them together. Because I'll tell you, Aaron, right now they've got a lot of problems. because in their mutual belief, what all three of them believed, Iran, Russia, China,

they believed that the West, the United States in particular, was weak, decadent, and divided. They came to that conclusion maybe by reading our media, but also by looking at Afghanistan. As you already met, you know, August of 2021, that humility and deadly withdrawal, hey, draw a straight line between that and the massive reinvasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. Draw a straight line between that and another affirmation that we're weak because we couldn't sustain support for Ukraine in 2023. Remember, we couldn't get that vote in the House of Representatives to be able to sustain weapons for Ukraine. Your Ayatollahominee at that moment, you're looking out at the region, you're looking at your to-do list. The top of the to-do list says,

destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. You're like, oh, okay, let me cross that one off because the Americans aren't even support Ukraine. They said they're going to be there forever for them, right? So I think what's provocative was the perception of weakness. But you know what? In provoking them with that perception of weakness, they have all over-extended. Because we weren't quite as weak. We weren't quite as decadent. And we weren't quite as divided as they thought.

And that overextension you can see certainly with the Russians, economy and his shambles, well over a million dead and severely wounded, can't regenerate the combat power. you know, economy that is that is stagnant, high inflation. He probably can't even demobilize at this point because it'll be an economic crisis. You know, you've got Iran, I mean, you know, if you read, you know, U.S. media reports, you think Iran's in just a great spot right now. Like, they've got the upper hand. Are you kidding me?

I mean, they have tremendous problems now in Iran. And if we see this thing through, this war by choking them out economically and with the blockade and we persevere, I just don't see a path to them regaining their capabilities. I mean, even if that regime stays in power, they'll do it just barely, and who the hell is going to invest in the Islamic Republic of Iran? Even the Chinese will know that's a bad investment. And then look at China, right? China, and its race to surpass us, has created huge vulnerabilities in its economy, and is

doubling down of what is not working for them, which is overproduction, overcapacity, dumping exports, right. So, hey, I think we are to position a significant advantage if we just took advantage in the moment, you know, stop, stop being at each other's throats, you know, recognize these threats, recognizing that, hey, you know, Americans should be celebrating, you know, our common identities of Americans, you know, and the principles that make this a great country, you know, and stop the, you know, the vitriolic partisanship, you know, and recognize that we're in a position of advantage at this moment. If we take advantage, of it. And by the way, we should probably stop kicking our allies in the ass at every opportunity

gratuitously. I find myself in the unusual position of largely agreeing with your policy prescriptions, but at the same time just being very concerned about our politics, whether we're talking about Iran specifically, so we can just start there and then zoom out. I think you presented it largely in positive terms that, you know, we have an opportunity here to do, to do a, to do a away with this absolutely toxic evil regime, and I'm with you, I think it's even more urgent than that. If we were to lose, and I'll define losing as if we were to wash our hands of it right now and walk away, the collapse of the American position in the Middle East would be catastrophic. There would be no more access to the Persian Gulf for the time being. I mean, we could make a

real list of horribles that would be the immediate consequence. It would be very, very, very bad. So as far as I can tell, there simply is, there is no way to pick that option. and pursue it. It's just a terrible, terrible outcome. And yet we have a war that was, if you look at the polls, unpopular when it started, even less popular now. One side of the political aisle completely opposed. Support weakening has been popular amongst Republicans, but weakening on that side. And so, you know, if you're the Iranians, you just got to hang on. You just got to hang. Could you hang on another six months? What does Congress look like then? You know, So then, and just to zoom out from that observation to more broadly, again, I find myself basically agreeing with you that the abandonment of Afghanistan was a tragedy for the Afghan people, that our ongoing presence there would in military terms have been, if not negligible, then certainly affordable in terms of the broad global commitments that we have. And we can keep making points like this in terms of what the strategic interest of the United States is and what our global responsibility to a particular consensus.

of order is. And absent us, that that order goes and it will be replaced by something else that we won't like. And I'm with you 100% of the way, or at least, you know, effectively 100% of the way as we work through those questions. And then I look at American politics. And you put it as, you know, we need to be, we need to stop being so partisan, et cetera. You know, the reason why we elect politicians who are not only often quite partisan, but also have strategic views that differ from the views that. you and I largely have a consensus on here is because they're politicians. So they're responsive to the opinions of the voters. And the voters don't love a lot of this stuff. And part of what I've

been trying to do here at School of War consistently episode, episode is explain why this stuff is important. But I'm not speaking, let's be real, I'm not speaking to the American people broadly. I'm speaking to a particularly interested audience in this subject matter. There is a huge gap between America's global responsibilities, 25 years on from 9-11, and what the American people seem to me to be, be careful how I phrase this, happy to bear.

Willing to bear, maybe, but happy to bear no. And I don't entirely know what to do about that. Man, it's a great point that you're making. You know, I think that what matters to boast here is presidential leadership, you know. And I want President Trump to succeed in Iran. you know, and in the Middle East.

And as you mentioned, the stakes are really high. And I think that's what a president has to communicate to the American people, right? And, you know, he started off by doing this okay, although I would have not done it on true social and I would have lost the white baseball hat, you know? I mean, you go, you know, war is serious business. But he did mention that, hey, this is an initiation of the war. We're not initiating the war. This is a 47-year-long war that we've been fighting against Iran.

And the mantra of escalation management, de-escalation has a work because it's essentially given Iran the opportunity to escalate on its own terms with impunity. And this is a moment of particular danger because they're building this missile drone strike complex as a conventional wall behind which they'll be able to pursue the most destructive weapons on Earth. And we can't have that. I mean, that's a strong argument. But stick with that argument, make it clearly, make sure the American people know two things, the stakes, right? First of all, the stakes. The second thing they need to know is what is the strategy? What is the strong? strategy that will deliver an outcome, favorable outcome, at an acceptable cost and risk. And the

communications around this war have been inconsistent. They've been unsurious. They've been bombastic. It's terrible, you know? I mean, I mean, don't do an AI-generated, you know, you know, meme or, you know, about attacking car. I don't know if that's not happening, right? I mean, be sober about this. The kind of chest beating that we saw. you know, during the Pentagon press beatings. I mean, hey, I just, so save it for Uncle Bob at the barbecue, man. Nobody talks, nobody talks about war like that who's been in combat, right? Nobody talks like that, you know?

And so, so explain that. Also from a diplomatic perspective, right? I mean, this war is in Europe's interest, damn it, and our European allies' interests. And I think we can make a compelling case for that, and they should be joining us in this war, especially to ensure freedom of navigation in the strait of war moves. But, hey, if you gratuitously kick him in the ass every day and then ask him for help, I mean, it may not work that. And that may not be effective, you know. So I agree with you.

The American people, they're not supportive of the war in large measure, you know. But I attribute that not to what is at stake in the war. It's our, I think the president's difficulty and the administration's difficulty in sending a clear, compelling, consistent message to the American people. and this vacillation that you've seen, you know. I mean, I think the ceasefire was a big mistake, you know, and we should have kept the pressure on the Iranians. I think that's ultimately where we're going to wind up here anyway. But I still believe that President Trump is a position of significant advantage here.

And if he has the opportunity to continue, you know, the economic fury or, you know, and what Secretary Besson is doing, I think is notable. and important, along with the military actions, to prevent the regime from reconstituting its ability to project power outside its borders. That in combination with internal dynamics, you see divisions within that leadership now, you know, with Ghalabov saying, oh, well, maybe we want to go back to the MOU, you know? And then you have what Israel is doing against Iranian proxy forces with depending maybe, who knows, demobilization of hostage shabbi militias in Iraq, right? you know, the perpetual weakening of Hezbollah.

I mean, what did they got left? The Houthis? Really? I mean, so I'm telling you, I think Iran is a position of profound weakness at the moment. And what we can't do is let them get back off the mat, you know? I mean, don't go back to Obama 2015 when they were in a weak position. And what did we give them? We gave them pallets full of cash. We unfroze their assets.

We gave them sanctions relief. And what did they do? Where did that cash go? It went to the terrorist and proxies in the region. It went to the land bridge to the Mediterranean. It went to the episodes of mass homicide and the Syrian Civil War. It went to the buildup of Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic jihad, the Houthis. Okay.

Let's not do that again. I want to shift gears for our last few minutes here and talk about the United States Army. This is an institution you spent 34 years of your life in. and you care about it deeply. It's a strange moment for the Army, I think. You have the Secretary of the Army reported he's going to step down now any day. You had the Chief of Staff of the Army, essentially fired, not that long ago. So that's Dan Driscoll, the Secretary, Randy George, General Randy George, the Chief of Staff.

In addition to that, you've had a wide range of officers either forced out of the service or their promotion. denied or rescinded. The most prominent among them was General Chris Donahue, who many saw as going on to greater things than his most recent billet commanding the U.S. Army in Europe. And just as the chiggering on top to all this, the current acting chief of staff of the Army of General Chris Lanieve, if you believe the press reports about it, it does not seem as though he's going to be confirmed anytime soon by the United States Senate, even though he seems to be the Secretary of War's preferred choice to be the Chief of Staff. And it's not clear at all right now who will succeed in being confirmed as Secretary of the Army,

which John McMaster leaves us in a situation where we are literally at war, and the Army is literally leaderless. What do you think? Well, of course, you're not totally leader. We've got leaders at various levels within the military, as you know. We've got redundancy built in for a reason, you know. But it's a terrible situation. in my view, you don't have a confirmed top civilian or uniform leader of the military at this moment.

And when I look at this from the outside and just read everything that you're reading, Aaron, I think it's based on a couple of fundamental misunderstandings. First, a misunderstanding about, you know, what is the true loyalty of officers in our army? Well, guess what? You know, like the Marine Corps, like all of our services, is to the Constitution of the United States. And so I think all administrations, this administration includes to stop trying to drag the military into partisan politics. Secretary Hexeth came in with an agenda.

An agenda I largely agree with, especially the agenda that involved reversing a lot of radical social ideas, you know, and practices that were partisan and political, in my view, on the military in a way that's destructive to combat effectiveness. And what I'm talking about here is for a moment to be clear about this is what some people just label as woke.

I don't think that's a useful term. But what I'm talking about is equality of come instead of a quality of opportunity. I'm talking about the valorization of victimhood. And the idea that you should judge the soldier next to you, you know, based on their identity category instead of what we do judge our fellow warriors by, which is their sense of honor, you know, their toughness, their courage, their willingness to sacrifice for the mission and for one another. That's how we evaluate fellow officers, not based on their sex or their color or their religion, you know, I mean, we don't do it. So I think that's a positive,

Jenna, but the way he's going about it, I think, has the danger of, again, pulling the military like into this partisan vitriolic discourse that we have, which will be destructive to our combat effectiveness, our, you know, our morale, everything. So let's not do this, right? On the far left, they had people who were trying to label the military as extremist, especially after January 6th, you know, when we know it's not true, you know, I mean, that veterans were over-repefew represented in that population. It wasn't, that's not as a falsehood. Or on the far right that the military is woke. I don't know by you, Aaron, I don't know any woke generals or admirals, you know, I mean, I might know if you woke, you know, college professors, but not generals and

admirals. So, you know, what those generals and others were doing, they were executing the policies of their civilian bosses consistent with the Constitution of the United States. So I think the misunderstanding is Secretary Hexas needs to know, he, he won. He won already. He's a Secretary of Defense, stop fighting this rear guard against phantoms, you know? And then this idea that there's some loyally test because, you know, somebody worked for, you know, previous chairman to the Joint Chiefs of Staff who the administration doesn't like. No, they worked for the Constitution. They worked for the Army, you know. And so I think this is, this is, you know, destructive to our ethic. But, you know, I think our professional ethic is intact. We will get

through this, I believe, and I hope that the secretary, you know, recognize, Secretary Hexon recognizes, hey, he's in charge now, you know, it's over. And, and, and what you don't want to do is create a climate in which, you know, everything's a loyalty test. You know what would be disloyal? What would be disloyal is to not tell your boss what your boss doesn't want to hear. And what we should do in the military is give our best advice, but not cross the line between advice or advocacy, because nobody elects generals to make policy, right? So I think, you know, if you really look at the behavior of our senior officers, those who have been asked to retire and everything else,

they've been the ultimate professionals in my view. You know, they understood what their role was. Your role is to serve, you know, to serve your country, do it as long as hard as you can. And like, in my case, hey, when I was done, I was done. I was okay with it, you know. I mean, I'm one of the first members of the club of general officers fired by Donald Trump, you know. I also got fired by President Biden, so bolstering my bipartisan credentials, you know, so, so, hey, I mean, I think that's what we have to all be concerned about is keep

that bold line in place between our military and partisan politics. How many presidents have to fire you before you get a set of steak knives, or is there, is there some sort of party benefit you eventually earn? Yeah, and then President Trump fired me again after that. So yeah, I mean, I've got a street going. Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster of the Hoover Institution, Arizona State University, 34 years in the Army, national security advisor to the President of the United States. A totally fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming on School of War. Hey, great to be with you, Aaron. Thanks.

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