General David Petraeus and Lord Andrew Roberts have a new book that could not be more timel: “Conflict:  The Evolution Of Warfare From 1945 To Ukraine.” Lord Roberts will join me in a few days for Part 2 of the discussion of the book. General Petraeus joined me this morning. The interview ill play on Friday’s radio show but for those who are eager for his early assessment of Israel’s war aims and dilemmas, here is the interview:

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HH: The book, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 To Ukraine by General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts is out. It’s hard to find a book more timely than this. General Petraeus, welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show. It’s been, I think, about 16 years since you’ve been on. Great to have you back.

DP: It’s been a while. Great to be back, Hugh. Thank you.

HH: Thank you. General, I want to begin. I’m going to talk with Lord Roberts next week about the first half of the book. I’m going to focus with you on the overarching themes and on the, especially the penultimate and final chapters of the book on Ukraine and the future of war. But I want to begin with my three takeaways. And I’m a civilian, and I read a lot of history, but this is what I take away – strategy, morale, and intelligence. On strategy, on Page 361, you write, “The first principle of strategic leadership is to get the overall strategy right.” Earlier, on Page 270, talking about Afghanistan, you quoted Clausewitz. “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to its nature.” On intelligence, you quote Max Hastings saying that in Korea, “We probably had the greatest intelligence failure in post-war American history.” That’s certainly true if you read Fehrenbach’s This Kind Of War. And on morale, you quote Churchill, saying, “Wars are not won by evacuation.” So with those three things, and with Ukraine in mind, would you assess where we are with the Israel-Hamas, and maybe Hezbollah and Iran war right now? Israel’s strategy, Israel’s morale, and obviously, their intelligence failure, maybe the greatest in the history of the Jewish state.

DP: I would. And again, a pleasure to be back with you. In what we stress in particular is that first item that you identified, the strategy. And we talk about the importance of strategic leadership. That’s at the very top of a country or a military command that’s going to carry out a campaign. And the strategic leader has four responsibilities, has to perform four tasks superbly if there is to be a chance at success. You have to get the big ideas right. This is the strategy. You have to really understand the situation in a very granular, nuanced manner, and get the big ideas right. And I’ll come back to that with where we think Israel is right now with the big ideas. And then probably where there’s a very substantial lack in that regard, you then have to communicate the big ideas effectively throughout the breadth and depth of the country, the organization, the military command, and everyone else who has a stake in the outcome of the campaign. And of course, when it comes to Israel, that’s the entire world. You have to oversee the implementation of the big ideas. This is the example, the energy, the inspiration. It’s how the leader spends his or her time, the battle rhythm, if you will, the schedule. That’s how you drive a campaign. It’s all the meetings you have. They should again be routine and so forth. They’re always taking place. And then it’s the metrics you use to determine whether you’re winning or losing, getting great people, allowing those not measuring up to move on to something else. And then a fourth task often overlooked, and it has to be done formally, it should be on the battle rhythm, on the leaders’ schedule, which is to sit down, force yourself to determine how you need to refine the big ideas, to do it again, and again, and again. If you think about this, by the way, very quickly, in Ukraine, what we’ve seen is an example of superb strategic leadership in the form of President Zelenskyy, and strategic leadership that has been quite flawed in the case of Putin. Zelenskyy, remember, his first big idea is I don’t want a ride, I want ammunition.

HH: Yeah.

DP: I’m going to stay…

HH: It’s a battle cry of freedom, I think you said it was, yeah.

DP: It, you know, just extraordinary stuff. Or let’s say George H.W. Bush at the beginning of, after Saddam’s forces take Kuwait. His military is not that keen, necessarily, to do this. They’re weighed down still by the lessons of Vietnam. He says at the very first meeting at the outset, this will not stand. They said okay, we’ve got that, and go about how to ensure that it does not stand. But to come back to Zelenskyy, then he says we’re going to stay in Kiev. We’re going to defend Kiev. All men are going to stay in Ukraine, and then on from there. Obviously, his communication skills have been brilliant. Andrew Roberts will affirm that. You know, having written the book on Churchill, he is an authority who can say that this has been Churchillian. And of course, the first wartime leader since Churchill to address both houses of Congress in Washington, but all the other legislative bodies, and he did it in a very specific manner to each. He’s also, every night, giving updates to his people, the rest of the world, et cetera. Then, he’s provided a brilliant example. I mean, he changes from a suit into his O.D. sweatshirt or T-shirt very early on. He’s on the front lines, provides inspiration, drives this campaign plan that they develop and all the rest, gets great people into positions. He’s not, doesn’t shrink from firing people that aren’t measuring up, or that are believed to be less than complete in their integrity and so forth. And then he’s constantly sitting down and determining how to refine the big ideas and do it again, and again and again. Well, now if we look at the situation with Israel, again, and we should remember that this is far orders of magnitude worse than what we experienced on 9/11. We took not quite 3,000 losses, innocent civilians, on 9/11, a country that’s vastly larger. Israel has taken 1,300, and the counting continues, which would equate to well over 40,000 equivalent for us. So this, the effect is absolutely predictable. The desire is understandable for revenge, for vengeance. But vengeance is not a strategy. Now it can translate into that if the big idea that is pursued is the destruction of Hamas. The Prime Minister, his military, the IDF chief of staff and others, and I know them, and I think very, very highly of them, and they’re very forthright. They will speak truth to power. They’ll say well, Prime Minister, we can destroy Hamas. But keep in mind that this will be fighting in a very, very tough urban environment. We’re seeing how difficult it is. You know, they didn’t do the hospital one, it’s pretty clear to me, but again, lots, there will be enormous collateral damage, damage to innocent civilians, losses, and to civilian infrastructure. And so it’s going to be very, very hard. We’re going to take tough losses. This is an enemy that was incredibly creative, terribly so, horrifically so, but was creative in what they’ve carried out in this, and in many ways, undermined the ability of the intelligence agencies of Israel to see the indicators and warnings, of course. So you’re going to see improvised explosive devices, suicide bombers. They’ll fight from within civilian populations. They’ll use these now over 200 hostages as human shields. This is going to be an extraordinary difficult campaign, keeping in mind that it took the Iraqi Security Forces 9 months with our help, direct help, to clear the city of Mosul in Northern Iraq, which you’ll recall when I was the commander of the 101st Airborne Division in the first year, was where we ultimately ended up after the fight to Baghdad. So we know it well. It’s comparable in size to Gaza City, although Gaza City has more high rises, which are particularly problematic. But again, this is not going to be quick. It’s not going to be clean. It’s going to be very, very messy and destructive, and so forth. But again, given what Hamas has done, this an extremist, this is the Islamic State. This is not, you know, an ideological freedom movement or something like that. So to destroy it, understandable, going to be really, really tough. But Prime Minister, what follows? You’ve said that we’re going to destroy Hamas, the extremist group, and also, of course, their partners, the Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and dismantle the political wing. So you will now have taken down the government and “security force”, they’re terrorists, but it still is a security force, in Gaza. And the question is what next? And you know, I had some personal experience with this during the fight to Baghdad where the 101st Airborne, we took the first major city, Najaf, you’ll recall, the holiest city in Shia Islam, 400,000 people or so. And I remember calling my boss afterwards and I said I’ve got good news and bad news. Good news is we own Najaf. He asked what is the bad news, and I said we own Najaf. What do you want us to do with it? And there really wasn’t a plan. He actually said call those guys that, you know, told us they’ll take over after Baghdad. And they didn’t respond. So we literally had to leave military forces behind to administer these areas. And over time, that became hugely challenging. I actually asked in Kuwait as well, can you give us a little more detail about what happens after we get to Baghdad and take down the regime? And they said you just get us to Baghdad, Dave, we’ll take it from there. Obviously, our post-conflict phase planning was inadequate. And then we compounded the challenges by firing the military without telling them what their future was…

HH: Oh, my gosh, your recounting of Ambassador Bremer’s three decisions, three huge mistakes. And I know you’re not ragging on the Ambassador, simply doing 20/20. But de-Baathification…

DP: Trying to provide, yeah…

HH: …extremism, disbanding the army and then ruling as a viceroy behind a front group? I think those were the three. That’s terrible.

DP: Yeah.

HH: General, I want to focus back on Israel and strategy.

DP: Yeah.

HH: It took Prime Minister Netanyahu a week to form the inner war cabinet. So we’ve got five people in there with them, and that’s great. I’m sure they’re working through strategy.

DP: That’s very good.

HH: I’m not sure it helps to have the President and now the prime minister of the United Kingdom and everyone coming in. They’re trying to get a strategy. How much do they take into account, the fact that Hamas is a puppet of Iran, Hezbollah is looming with 160,000 missiles, and Iran and those two puppet groups, their strategy is to destroy Israel? They have an unequivocal strategy which they call decolonization, but what they really mean is to wipe the state of Israel off.

DP: Yup.

HH: So I don’t really, their strategy is fixed. And I’m concerned that the shock, we invented shock and awe. You did, actually, shock and awe. They’ve got maybe shock and debilitate. Now Israeli morale is very high right now. Their intelligence was very flawed.

DP: Extraordinary, yeah.

HH: But do they go after Iran if they want to survive as a state?

DP: Well, the reason we have one carrier task force out there and another one on the way is to be prepared for whatever might happen, obviously to send a strong signal that dissuades Iran from any direct action in this case not just against Israel, but also against the soldiers that we still have in Iraq and in Northeastern Syria. And you may have seen there were several drones shot at some of these soldiers in the past 48 hours. So we, and then we’ve beefed up our air power. We have raised the force protection levels, our air and ballistic missile defenses are, again, at different alert levels, et cetera. There’s no question everyone is keenly aware of the role that Iran has played here. They fund, they equip, they often train, take a number of different actions, and we’re talking very substantial sums of money for Hamas. And by the way, interestingly, of course, Iran is Shia, Hamas is Sunni Arabs, but also for the Shia elements in Lebanon, that’s Hezbollah, very worrisome in particular, because as you know, they have 150,000 rockets which could overwhelm the extraordinary air and ballistic missile defenses of Israel, but hammered in the 2006 war with Israel. And I remember reassessing that when I was between Iraq and Afghanistan commands as U.S. Central Command, which is the entire Middle East region. We reassessed it and said wow, they did a lot more damage to Hezbollah and Southern Lebanon than we realized initially. And then when I was the CIA director, we reassessed again. So I’m not sure that Hezbollah is particularly enthusiastic about a large-scale engagement with Israel, over which again they will get hammered once again. And Israel can really do that. That’s in an air power task. And they can very much bring that to bear. But the threat to Israel is very substantial if they can overwhelm, swarm these air and missile defenses. Then, you have Shia militia…

HH: Have I stated, in your opinion, correctly the Iranian strategic objective, though, and Hamas and Hezbollah by extension, which is to destroy Israel? Not a two-state solution, they don’t want recognition.

DP: Oh, no question.

HH: They want to destroy it.

DP: Yeah, no question. And they want to drive us out of the Middle East, and drive wedges between the countries there. There’s no question about that. And they’ve been trying to do that, and let’s remember, in fact, when I was the commander of the surge in Iraq, their explosively-formed projectiles, these were very lethal improvised explosive devices that could slice through an M-1 tank’s amour. So they’re very, very substantial, and they killed over 600 of our soldiers. So again, you know, you know rule number 1 of the Middle East is know who your enemies are and know who your friends are. And it’s very, Iran is absolutely in the enemy category. And you might want to talk to them nonetheless, as we’ve always talked to enemies, did arms control with the Soviets and everything else. But don’t ever lose sight of the fact that they are our enemy. They are Israel’s enemy, our closest partner and ally in that region. So no question about that, and you can walk further around the region and even get down to Yemen and their support for the Houthis, which has also been very malign.

HH: Now General, I know want to go, Israel’s strategy, intelligence, and morale, is very different from America’s strategy, intelligence, and morale. And I wonder if you have any thoughts on, we had an intelligence failure as well. We didn’t want Israel that Hamas was about to do this. I don’t know that we have a strategy, because we’re trying to pivot to deal with the ChiComs, and we’re not, and we haven’t got a strategy on Ukraine that brings everyone together. And the morale in this country is shattered, right? We are the most divided we have been in my lifetime, 67. And therefore, I wonder, and this is a tough question, but I came through the Afghanistan and Iraq chapters just, they’re rugged to read, because the detail is so precise, thinking I wonder if bin Laden actually won? He intended to divide the United States and force it out. And we are now the most bitterly divided country we’ve ever been. And I wonder if Hamas’ intent was simply to do the same thing, to destroy, they took advantage of the bitter partisan divide within Israel to surprise and shock. Do you think we can get back out of this hole on strategy, intelligence, and morale that we’ve dug for ourselves?

DP: I do. And by the way, thanks for being such an important voice right of center, frankly, on supporting Ukraine. I’ve found your arguments very compelling. You had the piece that you had a few months back in the Washington Post on the reasons why a conservative should support Ukraine.

HH: Thank you.

DP: I mean, obviously, anyone, I think, in America should support Ukraine, but obviously you have particular resonance with your audience in that regard. That was hugely important, because of course, it is some of the members far right of center in the House that have provided such problems when it comes to continuing the support for Ukraine. Look, I do believe, actually, Hugh, that we can keep all the plates spinning that we need to keep spinning, and that includes a comprehensive, integrated, whole of governments approach to China to ensure that deterrence is very strong. It includes the same with respect to North Korea, China vastly more important. And we do this together with our allies. We can continue to support Ukraine, and it’s not mutually exclusive to support Ukraine and also provides resources for Israel and for our Southern Border, and for the emergency management agency, which because of hurricanes and fires is running out of money, and for that matter, for Taiwan as well. I believe we can do all of this. I believe that we should have stayed in Afghanistan. I think that the withdrawal from Afghanistan sent a message to Putin that confirmed his earlier assessments that we didn’t have the strategic patience, and that we wouldn’t respond as strongly as it turns out we have actually responded when it has come to Ukraine. But as you know, I’m completely non-political. And I believe the administration has done an impressive job in responding to Ukraine in general. The amount that’s been provided is very, very substantial. That obviously involves bipartisan support from Congress. I’d like to have seen some of those decisions made more rapidly, without question – tanks, Western aircraft, longer-range missiles and a variety of others. But by and large, I think we have done a good job there, and I think the big idea from the U.S. so far when it comes to Israel, that we have Israel’s back, has also been very important, and certainly, but should be concerned about the humanitarian situation given the way, just because we’re fellow human beings, but also because it reverberates around the region that is quite combustible now. But if I can come back again to the Israeli big ideas, Hugh, to really emphasize this issue of what next. Again, the military will say we can do this mission. It’s going to be costly, damaging, destructive, et cetera. But we want to make sure that if we do this, that once we “own Gaza”, you know, good news and bad news. Good news is we’ve destroyed Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and dismantled the political wing. Bad news is, you know, we’ve done this and we own it. Pottery house rules. You break it, you own it. And the conundrum, I think, that is probably increasingly troubling for the Israelis as well as for others, is what would then follow. Israel understandably does not want to reoccupy Gaza. They left in 2005 for a reason. That obviously didn’t work out as was hoped when Hamas was able to win the election in 2007 and take over and become increasingly nefarious. And as with any extremist authoritarian regime, they’ve never had an election since then, of course. But you know, we see Egypt doesn’t want any more Palestinian refugees. The Jordanians don’t want them. They have actually more Palestinian refugees than they have descendants of the Hashemite tribes. Other countries are not exactly raising their hand and saying I’d like to lead an interim international authority that would not only administer and hand out its humanitarian assistance and restore basic services, but there’s going to have to be a hard edge to whatever it is that controls Gaza, because they’ll need a counterinsurgency campaign. Hamas and Islamic Jihad remnants, and there will be remnants, it’s inevitable, will try to come back. And you’re going to have to identify them through very precise intelligence, the kind that we developed over time in Iraq and Afghanistan when we were doing 12 to 15 targeted operations every night. So that’s crucial. But I think, you I know, I believe firmly in the U.S. I believe in our system. I recognize the challenges that we have with this hyper-partisanship and the dysfunctions in the House of Representatives that is preventing us from doing what the vast majority of Americans know we need to do right now, which is very expeditiously pass authorization and appropriations for Israel. And still a very strong majority believes that we should continue to support a fellow democracy, however flawed, Ukraine, that has been invaded in a brutal and unprovoked manner by its neighbor, Russia.

HH: You know, General Petraeus, we are taping this before President Biden addresses the country. And I’m hoping he lays out a strategic vision that people can understand. My understanding of the world, and I came to this, Conflict arrived exactly at the right time for Hugh Hewitt, because I had read Ike biography, I had read the Nimitz biography, reread the MacArthur biography this summer to try and get ready for, and then Conflict arrived and This Kind of War, the Fehrenbach classic. And I decided we’ve got to get Americans to understand it’s one conflict. It’s a triangle of tyrants in Beijing, Moscow and Iran. And they have proxies, et cetera.

DP: Essentially, yeah.

HH: It’s sort of like George Marshall and Truman, or FDR trying to persuade the American people it’s one war and we’re going to do this first.

DP: Yup.

HH: We can’t forget Ukraine in helping Israel.

DP: Yup. No, we cannot.

HH: And we cannot turn away from Taiwan. So if you were in the Oval with the President right now, or in the Knesset back chamber with the war cabinet, how would you advise them to address their respective populations, and the world?

DP: Well, with the United States, I think there has to be a compelling and convincing argument that it is in our interest, our national interest to continue to support the so-called rules-based international order that we and the UK and others established in the wake of World War II, which for all of its shortcomings, has generally served the world and the United States very well. And this means helping countries that have been invaded by a neighbor without provocation, in the case of Russia invading Ukraine, and doing so in a particularly brutal manner. You know, Russia seems to have a culture of committing war crimes, not preventing them. So again, we have to support it. Henry Kissinger, who was cautious about NATO expansion, as you well know, has actually said Ukraine is really where now NATO security begins. NATO security begins on the border between Ukraine and Russia, and we have to recognize that given how much support we have provided to Ukraine. And the sooner we can enable Ukraine, together with our European partners who have now stepped up even more than we have in the financial and humanitarian assistance, and we believe in the security assistance pledges as well, the sooner we can enable them to convince Putin that this war is unsustainable, and so it has to be on the battlefield, but also in terms of the economic, financial and personal sanctions, and export controls being tightened, and then sanctions evasion. So that’s Ukraine. When it comes to the Indo-Pacific, we have to ensure that the elements of deterrence are very, very solid. As you know, there’s two elements to that. It’s the potential adversary’s assessment of your capabilities on the one hand, and your willingness to use them on the other. We have to make sure there’s no doubt about that. We have to remind people that what happens in one part of the world reverberates in others. President Xi seized on the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the way it was conducted to say see, you can’t count on the Americans. They’re an undependable ally. And look how it went. They’re also a great power in decline. So we have to be conscious of that. And now, we have to come to the aid of Israel with everything that we can provide to them, but while also helping them figure out this really difficult question of the day after, the post-conflict phase. And this is a real conundrum. And I suspect, I’m sure that the military leaders are discussing that with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and now with the war cabinet that reassuringly includes a long-time friend of mine, former Israeli Defense Force chief of staff Benny Gantz, who later was, of course, the minister of defense in an earlier government. So these are the issues. Now beyond that, Hugh, I think that we have to level with the American people and say that we face the greatest number and greatest complexity of threats since at least the end of the Cold War, probably than World War II, but we have the capacity and the capability to address these threats together with allies and partners. And we should keep them with us, because they help us keep all these different plates spinning that we have, you know, to use the circus metaphor of the guy who has to keep a lot of plates spinning. And we are the country uniquely has to see to that, but wants a much help as we can get keeping those plates spinning from our friends and allies. And when it comes to Prime Minister Netanyahu, again, it’s really about okay, we can destroy Hamas, and I understand the desire to do that, the imperative to do that, really. Again, they are the Islamic State. These are not reconcilables. They have to be captured our killed. Their bases, infrastructure has to be destroyed. All of this, but how do you go about that? And most importantly, what happens then? We don’t want to have a situation which would be even more acute, really, than what happened when we very rapidly, more rapidly, I think, than the planners expected, were able to take Baghdad, topple the regime, and then said okay, now what do we do? And the answer was not sufficient.

HH: General, there are a couple of asides in the book, and I want to make sure I cover them, because I thought boy, there’s so much in Conflict. People have to read it for themselves. One of them on Page 386, “As warfare evolved, so, too, did debates about the immense cost of aircraft carriers, for example, vis-à-vis weapons such as a drone swarm.”

DP: Yup.

HH: Well, we just sent two carriers. I think they’re going to stand off 500 miles from Hezbollah so the Hezbollah missiles can’t hit them. But how is this informing? Was that a targeted message to Congress about how to reconfigure our military, our Pentagon, our spending, and our assets, especially the configuration of our Navy?

DP: Yes, and, but it’s really all services, Hugh. And it’s to the Pentagon as well, because there’s vested interests. You know, remember Senator McCain used to call it the military industrial Congressional complex. And if you look at each element of that triad, if you will, they each have vested interests in preserving what we have now. And don’t get me wrong. It’s awesome. When I was the commander of U.S. Central Command, we had a 2.0 presence, it was called. We always had two aircraft carrier taskforces in that theater. Of course, we also had 250,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines in at least two and a half wars plus counterpiracy operations. So very, very busy and needed those. But we have to recognize that for the war in the future, and of course, we have a chapter on the future of war, an old adage from the Cold War that we could never really operationalize, but we recited it a lot, will be very operational in the Indo-Pacific. And this used to go what can be seen can be hit. What can be hit can be killed. Well, in today’s day and age, unlike during the Cold War, you can see just about everything. You can hit just about everything. Yes, there are defenses possible, and you can harden to disburse and all the rest of that. But at the end of the day with hypersonic missiles that can maneuver in the final mile and so forth, it’s very difficult to defend. So these, we have to go from a world of a small number of very large platforms, and again not just maritime, but also in the air, on the ground and so forth, which are incredibly capable. They’re wonderful to have. You’ve got to keep a substantial number. But we have to transform from that to a massive number of unmanned systems, some of which may still be remotely piloted, but most of which increasingly will be algorithmically piloted, and where the human in the loop will be the human on the loop, the human who designed the software that established the conditions that the machine has to meet, and a machine, by the way, that’s learning, uses machine learning, and it’s constantly advancing with artificial intelligence as well. And these are the drone swarms. But it’s not just in the air. It’s on the surface of the sea. It’s subsurface, which is particularly important, because that’s the area that’s most difficult to detect. It’s in space. It’s on the ground. And it’s in cyberspace. The equivalent there, which is already ongoing, you know, we’re in a daily battle in cyberspace all around the world, our defense systems, and indeed industrial companies and all others are under siege when it comes to cyberspace, and the need therefore for very comprehensive, integrated cybersecurity. So yes, we do need to transform, and it is, yes, a message to those who are the decision makers in the military industrial Congressional complex.

HH: Now General, also to that point about leadership, you wrote on Page 22 very early on about how MacArthur probably is precluded from holding, a MacArthur is probably precluded from holding general rank today, because of his massive ego.

DP: Oh, yeah.

HH: But he was very instrumental in rallying the American public, and rallying the Pacific. We’ve had a few generals, and I don’t want to embarrass you, but I think you’re one of them. I think General McChrystal, General McRaven are others, who inspired Americans. And I don’t know that our current political leadership is looking for inspiring military leadership now. What is your assessment of our ability right now to raise morale by, via the military leadership in the country?

DP: That’s a good point. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s difficult, because certainly President Bush, George W. Bush, especially when he selected me to command the surge, he was very comfortable with having a high-profile commander become the face of the surge together with the greatest diplomat ever, any soldier ever had as a partner, Ambassador Ryan Crocker. We were very high visibility. He wanted that, in particular and in part because some other elements had been discredited at that point in time. And we preserved our credibility very zealously. We worked very hard to be first with the truth, not first with spin. We didn’t put lipstick on pigs. If it was a bad day, we came out and said that it was just that. And that, you know, you become what was termed a military celebrity. In the subsequent administration, that was not quite as welcomed. And we saw that, and there was, you know, there were reservations about that caution, other emotions, perhaps, and even a feeling that, you know, I had a particular problem where there was a sense that I was going to run for president, even though I hadn’t even register to vote since I became a two-star general, deliberately. And yet there was a sense that well, this could happen, and we need to be cautious around this guy. So that was very challenging. And I think in many respects, that has been the climate that has continued since then, and it’s difficult for military leaders. They have to be very cautious in stepping out. And you know, if they end up with their picture on the front page of Newsweek or something like that, again, that’s not uniformly applauded on the other side of the Potomac River.

HH: You know, General, this is a bipartisan problem. It’s not a Democrat or a Republican problem.

DP: Right. Totally.

HH: George Bush ordered the elections in the West Bank, and Gaza vote one time, once forever, and Secretary Rice has admitted what a terrible mistake. You have the Bremer mistakes. You have President Obama trying to split the difference between General McChrystal’s report and what he did.

DP: Yup.

HH: And President Biden, you’ve got Bob Gates saying President Biden has never been right in 40 years. You don’t have civilians who I think respect military judgment. And probably, I’m glad you replaced him, but your friend, a friend of the program, General McChrystal, he’s been in this studio when he’s written books, gets fired over a reporter being embedded.

DP: Great guy.

HH: One story, and a bunch of loudmouth colonels who are having a couple of drinks with, I don’t know why anyone let…but McChrystal will never say a bad word about his underlings. How does anyone get anything done in the military in this environment?

DP: Well, you’ve got to be careful about it, but I think you can get very much get stuff done. And look, I’d point out that George W. Bush, when he committed to the surge, committed wholeheartedly.

HH: Yeah.

DP: I remember actually sitting with him in the Oval Office after confirmation, before heading back to Iraq. And he said well, General, you know, we’re doubling down. And I said Mr. President, your military is going all-in, and we need the rest of government to go all-in with us. And he said I will see to that. And for a president to then oversee a weekly meeting, to chair a weekly meeting in Washington on a Monday morning at 7:30am, look at the presidential schedules of the presidents that follow him. They don’t do anything before 9:00 or 10:00 in the Oval Office. He’s in the NSC in the West Wing Situation Room at 7:30 on a Monday morning with the entire national security team there with him, and doing a videoconference with Ambassador Crocker and me. You want to show your priority as a president? Hold a meeting at 7:30 in the morning on Monday. That’s how you start your week, and you show…so again, I felt that his role as commander-in-chief during the surge in particular, so that’s the final two years that he was in office, was truly admirable, truly impressive. And he didn’t care about who got credit or all of the rest of that stuff. He was very comfortable having Ambassador Crocker and me take a very prominent role in all of that during that time. But…

HH: Yeah, a lot of people think W.’s finest hour was after 9/11. And it was when he stood on the car with the firemen. But the library speech when he announced the surge after getting whacked in the 2006 elections, and he went to the library and he delivered the surge speech.

DP: It was courageous.

HH: Amazing.

DP: Yup. Yeah, it was really courageous. And keep in mind that most of the military leadership was not wholeheartedly enthusiastic about that. They were worried about, and again, understandably, strain on the force and the possibility, one of them said sir, this could break the service. And he responded what would really break the service, or break the military, would be to lose a war.

HH: Well, we lost Afghanistan. That’s…

DP: And it was a really courageous moment.

HH: That’s where I’m going with my last 10 minutes, the consequences of losing a war after 20 years, both in terms of morale and strategy going forward. You saw the disastrous withdrawal, Abbey Gate. Nobody has resigned. Nobody has said it’s my fault. What I really respect about Israelis, the head of Shin Bet stood up and said after the war, we will deal with this intelligence failure. It’s my fault.

DP: Yeah.

HH: What do we do about the consequences? You mentioned Xi noted that. Putin noted our withdrawal. I think he invaded Ukraine the second time because of our collapse. I think Xi got aggressive towards Taiwan. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Iran miscalculated in the planning of this Hamas attack, thinking that we were out of the game. What do you think the consequences of the failure was?

DP: Well, again, all of that you said. I think it undermines credibility. And again, it was not just the way the withdrawal was conducted. In my view, it was the decision to carry through with an agreement made by his predecessor, which I felt was among the worst diplomatic agreements in our history, when he overturned many other of the decisions of the previous president when it came to foreign policy. So he had every possibility to do that. 3,500 troops and a lot of drones and air power, maybe $25 billion dollars a year in total, is not beyond the capabilities of a country that is spending, at that time, $750-800 billion dollars on Defense. We have the capacity to do this. Yes, it was incredibly frustrating, a maddening situation. Our partners were imperfect, and we saw just how imperfect when of course the president of the country instead of going to the front lines, went to the airport and got on a helicopter and flew out of the country. So understand all the frustrations there. But surely, the result, I actually said when the decision was announced, that I feared that we would regret that decision. I believe we have. We should have, because what transpired was not just frustrating, it wasn’t just tragic and heartbreaking. It, I believe, has been disastrous. And of course, the fact that the leader of al Qaeda within a few months is found downtown in Kabul a few blocks from the Afghan White House, the palace, sort of validates that as well. Now it’s great that my old comrades were able to track him down and take him out. But that was a, I think that was a clearly serious and bad moment for the United States. And there, it did reverberate, as you say. I think it did. It was one of the factors, actually, that probably convinced Putin that we would not respond as strongly as we actually have. I’d say some other ones – the red line that wasn’t a red line in Syria, Bashar al-Assad must go, but then we don’t to anything to make him go actually had a relatively inadequate response to Crimea and the Donbas, and also the muted response to the Russian invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia. So there’s a number of cases along the way that I think started to convince would-be, the axis of the sanctioned, if you will, the leaders of those countries, that the U.S. would not respond in the way that we have actually responded in Ukraine, some of the slow decision making notwithstanding. We kept the alliance together. We kept Russia from driving a wedge between Europe and North America. We very much supported our Ukrainian partners. I was just out there again. They are hugely appreciative of what we’ve done, but they’re very worried about whether or not they’re going to see…

HH: Well, they should. I mean, I would be very worried, too, given the state of our Congress. General, when one of your successors at the Agency, good friend of mine and the former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said the Doha agreement would never have allowed for what happened in Afghanistan, because the former president would have responded to anything like the Taliban advance. But I think you imply in the book that the original failure in Afghanistan was not to define the mission. And by not defining the mission, and the Achilles heel of Afghanistan, I think I recall, was the failure to build up the Afghan Security Service in the right way. Is there any way…

DP: We squandered fear.

HH: Is there any way we could have won that war?

DP: You know, again, winning is so, especially when you have sanctuaries in the neighboring country and your partner there, Pakistan, refuses to allow you to do anything about them or to do anything about them themselves. That was really the Achilles’ heel. But the real issue was that we didn’t even get the inputs right in Afghanistan after a brilliant campaign that topples the Taliban, again, a handful of Special Forces on horses and CIA clandestine service officers with money and with surrogate forces. And we did eliminate the sanctuary in which al Qaeda planned the 9/11 attack. So a brilliant initial opening round. But then, we lost sight of it. We focused very quickly on Iraq and didn’t keep sufficient eye on Afghanistan. And it took us nine years from late 2001 until late 2010 to actually finally get the right big ideas, the right strategy. It had to be there. It’s inescapable that you had to have a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign. You may not like nation building, but if you don’t build up the host nation forces and institutions, you can’t leave. And so, and by the way, we were over the years able to draw down without losing the whole thing, because we actually had built up adequate forces in certain respects, imperfect, but again, they were doing the job reasonably well with our support. But we didn’t have the right level of resources, and then when we did have the right level of resources, we told the enemy in the speech that we announced the buildup that we’re also going to start drawing down 18 months later, which tells them in a contest of wills, that we really don’t want to engage fully in that particular contest. So it called into question our strategic patience. You have to get the right organizational architecture. This is not trivial in a mission where you have NATO lines of command, U.S. lines, special mission unit lines and all the rest of that, the right preparation of our forces, the right leaders and all the rest of this. We didn’t get that until late 2010, and we only kept it at that level for about 7 months or so before we started the drawdown, and the drawdown that was not necessarily based on conditions. It was based on essentially arbitrary timelines.

HH: General, I have time for two more questions with you, so I want to focus 1) on the presidential campaign underway and the questions that should be asked. Salem is co-hosting with NBC and co-moderating the next presidential debate in Miami. I am curious if you got to put a question into the mix for whomever is on the stage, I don’t know if the former president is going to come or not, but certainly Governor DeSantis and Governor Haley and Tim Scott will be there, and Vivek Ramaswamy. What would you ask those candidates who aspire to lead this country?

DP: I would ask a question that would force them to explain their big ideas, again, the first task of a strategic leader, about America’s role and responsibilities in the world, and then how they would actually carry that out. What, in general terms, how is it that they would, so tell us in general terms, you know, would you establish or continue, because we have the elements, most of the elements for a comprehensive, integrated, whole of governments with an s on the end to imply all of our allies and partners approach to China? Would you continue to support Ukraine? What would you do to enable Israel? Again, just walk your way around. So give them the six most significant and pressing issues in the world, and ask them to actually explain what they’re going to do so they can’t obfuscate or duck that particular question. It’s not enough to say that we are the indispensable nation and we should stand up for the rules-based international order democracy and the other values that we treasure. But then specifically, how are you going to go about this?

HH: Now the last question is because Chairman Gallagher is a good friend, will be very angry with me if I don’t bring up China at the end, the Chinese Communist Party. And their attack on our homeland is pretty significant, very, very substantial, and very sophisticated. They operate online from troll farms that put to shame the troll farms of Russia, which are rather ham-handed and obvious, and we know who they are, not the CCP. And they’re everywhere all the time. They’re bigger in numbers than we are by a lot in information and data matters. They’re producing data at a far greater level than we are. Their AI systems will be stolen from us and improved by them. What is the most important message you give to the American public? Conflict deals a little bit with the CCP. It’s in various places. But we’re not yet in a war with them, but we might be real quickly in Taiwan. What’s the message the American public should take away from Conflict that you and Lord Roberts would have them know about the CCP and particularly about General-Secretary Xi?

DP: First of all, I have enormous respect for Congressman Gallagher. He was a great Princeton graduate, Marine PhD from Georgetown, worked for me a couple of times over the years. And again, I think very highly of him. In fact, I’ve worked with him to help his committee do the economic war game they did of Wall Street. I participated in that.

HH: Oh.

DP: When it comes to the response to this question, I think there’s a general response first, which is that money spent on deterrence is generally well spent. Yes, it should be efficient, effective, and all the rest of that. But that it is vastly less to spend on deterrence than if you actually get into conflict. And that war will cost you much, much more. And the critical component of our comprehensive, integrated, whole of governments approach to China has to be to ensure that deterrence is solid, that the potential adversary’s assessment of our capabilities on the one hand, and our willingness to employ them together with allies and partners, is without question, and that we continue to make those forces, again, more disbursed, better defended, underground, so again, the survivability of them is improved. There’s a whole bunch of measures that need to be taken. But it’s not enough just to do the military component. You need all the other aspects. There’s really a glaring absence under the previous administration and this administration when it comes to that comprehensive approach. And that, as you know, that’s in the lack of a trade component. We should have actually continued through the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We should still, I believe, go back to it. The Indo-Pacific economic framework that’s been established is a nice attempt to replace that with something, but it’s far from a real trade agreement. I actually argued at the time that that trade agreement was more important in terms of our national security than it was in terms of economic and so forth. But that’s the way to approach this. Then, you get into the specifics of how it is that we are going to mitigate the risk from the kinds of attacks that you raise, reduce our enormous reliance on certain exports and so forth, so all the different components. And to be fair, I think the Congress and the White House, in this case, have done quite a bit of work in that regard. I mean, there’s, as you well know, there is one issue on which both parties agree, and that is the need to be more firm with China, not needlessly provocative, but more firm, and to ensure that each morning that folks get up in Beijing, they say okay, not today. And we need to keep that going long enough until there’s a recognition that you know, can’t we all just have a more mutually beneficial relationship, given that they’re the number two economy and we’re the number one. And by the way, they’re our number three trading partner. So I tend to agree with our Treasury Secretary who says that you cannot decouple from China. You can de-risk, but it’s, you cannot decouple. We have enormous dependency on them for a whole host of different exports. They have an enormous dependence on us when it comes to two very important tasks – feeding their people and feeding their livestock. So again, we have to understand those realities. We have to lay that out. It should be, again, comprehensive, not all military, all the other components of national power should be brought to bear here in a coordinated, integrated, whole of governments with our allies and partners in fashion.

HH: I think that’s what Chairman Gallagher and his Democratic colleagues are trying to do. And I hope it’s what everyone takes away from Conflict, is that it’s all one puzzle. Everything is a piece of one puzzle, and Conflict is really well done, and I look forward to talking to Lord Roberts, because Andrew’s the best historian working today. And I think you guys have produced really quite a classic in Conflict. Thank you for your big dollop of time this morning. I’m sure it’s a pretty busy schedule for you, and I appreciate it very much, General.

DP: Great to be with you, Hugh, and it really has been a privilege and a delight, actually, to work with Andrew Roberts, the Baron Roberts of Belgravia.

HH: What a great title. We don’t get titles in America, but that would be the one that you’d want – Belgravia. Thank you, General. Have a good day.

End of interview.