A veteran general hears echoes from Vietnam in Iraq

A veteran general hears echoes from Vietnam in Iraq
By Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers
Mon Aug 6, 10:08 AM ET

WASHINGTON — Volney Warner thinks big. A retired Army four-star general who helped craft counterinsurgency doctrine during the Vietnam War, he's made a career out of thinking about how U.S. military strategy should advance America's global interests.

How does domestic politics shape military tactics? How and why did U.S. civilian and military leaders fail in Vietnam and Iraq ? What has Iraq taught the U.S. military about unconventional war?

Warner is more than a detached student of America's current conflicts: Seven of his immediate family members have served in the military, five of them in Iraq or Afghanistan . They include his two sons, one a retired brigadier general and the other a retired colonel; a son-in-law who trained local troops in Iraq as a brigadier general; a granddaughter who's a captain in the Army Reserve ; a grandson serving in Iraq and another grandson at West Point who'll be commissioned as an officer in June and probably ordered to a war zone immediately.

Also, Warner's 24-year-old granddaughter, Army 1st Lt. Laura Walker , who served in Iraq in 2004 and was killed by a homemade bomb a year later on her second combat tour, this time in Afghanistan . Her death makes Warner ponder, sometimes publicly, who was responsible for sending his granddaughter to two war zones without a sound strategy for victory.

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Two years later, he described a dire scenario: "In my view, there are situations in the world the U.S. cannot resolve militarily or otherwise. Vietnam was one of them. Iraq is another. Neither war was ours to win and both were theirs to lose. . . . We always have been very poor at making distinctions between military and political victories and losses and prone to supporting the losing side on Civil Wars— except for our own."

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