I recently returned from a deployment to Afghanistan and am often asked “how is it going over there,” or, “what was it like.” To answer those questions in true military fashion, it seems appropriate to record my “Lessons Learned,” as any good officer would.

My first observation is that I didn’t observe much, and am led to believe many others had a similar experience. Afghanistan isn’t WWII; there aren’t a million young men in the fields shooting and getting shot at trying to move the lines and take more ground. This is an extremely complex and confusing war with everyone playing an extremely small and distinct role. Let me not downplay in any way the realities of those who are putting their life in extreme danger on a regular basis, I’m simply stating that I believe there is a lot of diversity in the experiences of those in Afghanistan. I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t feel like I was in harm’s way any more than when I spend an hour and a half a day commuting back and forth to work in Las Vegas. While I was directly involved in the unpleasant work of employing weapons, the nature of my job allowed me to do so without ever leaving the secure gates of the base. I spent my fair share of time sitting in a bunker avoiding attempted mortar attacks, but wasn’t exactly in the trenches wondering if I’d make it home or not. I don’t know that my limited experience qualifies me to make any comment on the war as a whole, but will do my best to share an opinion.

With that in mind, the main theme I’d like to comment on is how different this war is from ones in the past – something I knew before, but felt profoundly while I was there. I believe this difference is not only due to the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, but even more so because of our nation’s attitude toward war. We use new terminology about what we’re doing in Afghanistan like counterinsurgency, nation building, winning hearts & minds, etc., but we must not forget that we executed a military invasion and occupation of a foreign country. This isn’t a novelty in history, many countries, including the US, have done this before. What’s profoundly different, in my opinion, is that our nation somehow thinks we don’t need to put forth the kind of effort that a military occupation requires. (I blame this, in part, on the lack of planning and cavalier attitude with which President Bush began the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) At the end of WWII, when Japan and Germany offered no armed resistance to occupation or likely insurgency, we still had hundreds of thousands of troops in those nations and spent billions of dollars to build functional democracies. Our “surge” in Afghanistan is bringing the troop numbers to a mere 100,000. As a percentage of our GDP, our total spending in Afghanistan (for military operations and aid) isn’t even close to what we spent on the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe (after all the spending on military operations). After Operation Desert Storm, it appears the US has assumed the military can accomplish any task quickly and efficiently without a high cost. However, what we should have learned from the first President Bush is the importance of ensuring international support, overwhelming military force, and having a defined objective. I’m not in any way insinuating a lack of public support for the military; I’ve felt overwhelming support for our troops. We simply have expected too much for too little.

In a speech at Duke University last September, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates commented on the nature of today’s all-volunteer military. He stated, “The Iraq and Afghan campaigns represent the first protracted, large-scale conflicts since our Revolutionary War fought entirely by volunteers. Indeed, no major war in our history has been fought with a smaller percentage of this country’s citizens in uniform full-time – roughly 2.4 million active and reserve service members out of a country of over 300 million, less than one percent.” This just highlights the mentality that the US has assumed – that we can invade, occupy, and democratize a nation without asking the whole country to participate. During WWII the entire nation contributed in some capacity, and now we’re asking a tiny subset of the nation to take care of a huge problem – and we don’t even want to pay more in taxes for it so we accept an absurd amount of debt. I’m also not implying that the 1% of nation in the military has anything more to offer than the other 99%. On the contrary, I think everyone in this nation is willing to give and sacrifice, but no one is asking them to. Great leaders of the past have met crises by asking us as a nation to give more, by motivating us to sacrifice. Today it seems unimaginable for a leader to acknowledge the price we must pay; it seems out of fashion to request sacrifice. Instead, our leaders try to tell us how, with their plan, we can have everything without paying a cost.

So instead of paying the necessary price to send our soldiers to war with every possible chance of quickly and efficiently finishing their goal, we are trying to do more with less and prolonging an already difficult conflict. We are sending contractors by the thousands to privatize our foreign policy and make up for our fear to ask people to sacrifice. In my first few days in Afghanistan, I was amazed by the amount of “civilians” I saw. We have contractors flying airplanes and carrying weapons, we have people wearing uniforms that say “DOD Civilian” because we don’t want to temporarily expand our military to stop 11 years of soldiers constantly leaving their families. Instead of sending 200,000 or 400,000 soldiers to ensure true security, we send a fraction of what’s needed and ask too much of them. 20 year old boys who have been trained to fire rifles and keep their buddy alive are being asked to win the hearts and minds of the local population. Instead of just worrying about keeping themselves and their buddies alive, they’re making decisions about whom they should or shouldn’t engage, and the political effect of every bullet they fire. They wear body armor and try to avoid IEDs but spend most of their time trying to convince the local leaders to stop taking bribes from the Taliban. After 9-12 months away from their families and not knowing if we’re any closer to success, they return home only to come back less a year later for their third or fourth time. While some of this difficulty is inevitable in Afghanistan, I believe we could have already overcome much of it with sufficient effort. Putting 400,000 troops on the ground 10 years ago to ensure security with a massive effort from the State Department and other agencies to build a workable economy and democratic process would have accomplished a lot – especially when we still had full support from the international community and a nation galvanized by 9/11 that would have been quick to do all that was necessary.

I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I believe we’re making progress and there’s no doubt much good is being accomplished. There are many people in and out of uniform doing great things. However, my most profound impression is that if we’re going to go to war it ought to be a national endeavor. If we are going to ask men and women to risk their lives in a foreign land we ought to give everything we can from the very beginning. I know it’s too late for Afghanistan; 10 years of war and a sinking economy have sapped our political will to make sacrifices, but hopefully we’ve learned the lesson since we’re still paying the price.