Quotes from Daniel P. Bolger

He sent in a conventional force, admittedly just a few men from the Tenth Mountain Division. It reminded all that there were never enough SOF. Airpower had killed effectively in Qala-i-Jangi. After all the hammering, though, people had to go in on the ground with rifles, grenades, and guts. To control dirt and the societies that lived on it, you had to use live, trained, disciplined humans, and more than a few.

The U.S. troops joked that ISAF stood for "I Suck at Fighting," "I Saw Americans Fighting," or "I Sunbathe at FOBs [forward operating bases].

Terrorizing you," he proclaimed, "while you are carrying arms on our land, is a legitimate and morally demanded duty.

In the West, military intelligence (MI) analysts have long followed a simple premise: Assess enemy capabilities, not intentions.

Afghanistan. Jarrah

America's innate uneasiness with death from above. It ill accords with the values of a democratic republic.

We even found time, and nomenclature, for loosely related campaigns. One was the 2011 imbroglio in Libya known at the outset as Operation Odyssey Dawn, a good name for a Las Vegas pole dancer but a bit exotic for a military campaign.

Master Sun put it simply: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril

The military could get by with fewer recruits because more in the ranks reenlisted. The quality of the volunteers turned out to be good, because the services insisted on drug-free high-school graduates with clean criminal records, criteria that ruled out 70 percent of American youth. (There is an unfortunate message in that statistic.) Smarter, tougher, and willing, volunteers trained and worked to their limits.

In 1944, B-17 bomber formations dropped 9,070 bombs in order to hit one German building. In 1967, F-105 jet fighter-bombers used 176 munitions to knock out a single North Vietnamese building. By 1991, a smart F-16 fighter-bomber could do the job with thirty bombs, or just one, if the bomb was smart too.

one of the duties of the U.S. Navy, going all the way back to the early 1800s, the days of the Barbary pirates of North Africa, involves showing the flag. Safe passage of Navy ships ensures unmolested transit of merchant shipping, always the main conduit of all overseas trade whether in 1800 or 2000. Port calls projected U.S. influence ashore and kept markets open. Freedom of the seas, like all freedoms, must be exercised or it will atrophy.

The last soldier killed, Specialist David E. Hickman of the Second Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, died in an IED strike in Baghdad on November 14, 2011.

Specialist David E. Hickman of the Second Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, died in an IED strike in Baghdad on November 14, 2011.

The U.S. collected information superbly and everywhere, from space to dirt. They tracked all kinds of events and things and people. For long-lead-time matters, like the order of battle for the Chinese fleet, that sufficed. For short-fuse needs, it got much, much more excruciating. Of the mass of data gathered, only a small percentage (50 percent? 10 percent? 5 percent?) ever got analyzed. Only a tiny fraction of that produced the specificity to allow action.

General George Patton wrote from long experience: "There are more tired division commanders than there are tired divisions. Tired officers are always pessimists." The lieutenant was tired. His sergeants were not. They wanted to continue the mission.

O gods, from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghan—deliver us. —TRADITIONAL HINDU PRAYER

The MI folks could usually tell you the make, model, year, paint color, and license plate of the semitrailer truck that just ran over you.