The Aftermath

Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul are joined by retired Lt. Gen. Dan Bolger—combat veteran, former division commander and author of "Why We Lost"—to tackle the question that has haunted American military strategy ever since Operation Iraqi Freedom: What do you do after you win?The conversation opens by discussing April 11, 2003, the day the Saddam Hussein regime fell and Task Force 2-7 Infantry was ordered to transition from combat operations to stability operations. Rutter and Paul put listeners on the ground in those first chaotic weeks—the looting, the power vacuum, hospitals overwhelmed, fires burning on every block and a force trained to destroy an enemy now asked to govern neighborhoods it had just fought through. Bolger delivers an unflinching assessment of what broke down at the strategic level. When Ambassador Jerry Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi army, hundreds of thousands of soldiers lost their paychecks overnight. Many of them already knew how to fight. The bushwhacking phase, as Bolger puts it, was one they could win.The deeper failure, though, wasn't any single decision. It was a military culture so focused on tactical excellence that it never fully grappled with the harder strategic question—win the fight, then what? When strategy fails, the load transfers down. All the way to the battalion commander, the platoon leader, the sergeant, the private. What kept things from falling apart in those early weeks wasn't strategic clarity. It was the NCOs.The episode closes with a warning as relevant today as it was in 2003: The American soldier will get the job done. The obligation for commanders and civilian leaders alike is to be worthy of them: to ask the strategic questions before the first soldier crosses the line of departure and define what victory looks like before committing to winning it.