Colonel David Hunt - On the Hunt: How to Wake Up Washington and Win the War on Terror

CONTENTS

For those who are serving in our great military today, and for those who served in wars pastmen like my brother Joey, who died in Quang Tri in 1968, and my dad, who served in the Pacific during World War II from Bougainville through Iwo Jima.

They are the bravest men I ever knew. Those in the fight now honor them and us.

CHAPTER 1

RIGHT IN FRONT OF US

Riding at thirty-five miles an hour on a behemoth that can kill from more than two miles away, wind and sand in your face, diesel fumes in your nose, men yelling in your ear on a radio, bad guys dying on the side of the road, you are exhaustedyou havent slept in thirty-six hours, and when you do sleep, it will be in a hole you digbut absolutely elated, knowing you and your brave men are finally doing what you have been trained to do for so many years.

All this was going through Colonel Dave Perkinss mind as he led his brigade of tanks and mechanized infantry across the Iraqi desert in March 2003. His soldiers were performing perfectly. His unit was ahead of the plan. He was a warrior god doing what he does best.

Perkins got his 5,000-man unit to a spot outside of Baghdad where his superiors wanted him to stop and wait. They wanted him to be a good colonel and ask permission before he entered the capital. He could have sat back, waited for permission, and spent days as a sitting duck while his superiors had three meetings, two briefings, and an ass-chewing before determining whether Saddam Hussein had set a trap inside Baghdad. Instead, Colonel Perkins took a risk: he made a dash for Baghdad. He called it a Thunder Run because of the speed, power, and noise of that many tanks running down the road.

It was an audacious, tactically risky move. And it was goddamned brilliant. Perkinss brave decision shortened the war and saved his guys. Colonel Dave Perkins is exactly the type of leader that makes our military great; we need more like him.

A few miles to the south of this great guy and his great men, a different story was unfolding.

Task Force Tarawa was a 1,000-man Marine unit moving up the right side of Iraq. Intel told them that the town they were about to hit, Nasiriya, was full of Shiites and very friendly to us. The operation was going to be a piece of cake. But the Marines didnt find friendly crowds in Nasiriya; they found a fight, a fight so bad that at several points they thought they might losenot a thing any Marine contemplates well. An Army maintenance company had already come under attack there, and several soldiers, including the now famous Private Jessica Lynch, were missing inside the city. Bad maps, bad communications, and friendly civilians who took up arms alongside the Sunni Saddam Fedayeen troops and some desperate foreign jihadis all conspired to give us a wake-up call that the Iraq war was not as it had been advertised.1

Unfortunately, we did not hear it.

These two battles demonstrate the underlying systematic problems we are having fighting the Global War on Terror. After we took Baghdad, we paraded around using the swift capture as an example of our might. We touted our win in Baghdad like the government touts the fact that we have not been attacked on American soil since 9/11: as if that demonstrates victory. It does not.

The guys who took Baghdad did a great job, but this one instance did not a winning strategy make, especially when at the same time there was also Nasiriya. What did we do after the Nasiriya battle? We did nothing. We ignored it. We ignored the fact that the Marines almost lost the battle like we would later ignore the insurgency, like we would ignore terrorist attacks that happened all over the world as if they didnt have anything to do with us. We didnt look at Nasiriya and figure out what went wrong. We didnt study it and learn how to prevent that kind of thing from happening in the future. We hid our heads in the sand and missed the lessons that we should have learned. The result of this is the chaos in Iraq and the terrorists who are winning in such places as Lebanon and Palestine. We ignore these lessons at our own peril.

In all wars, and specifically the wars we are fighting now, how well we do is important, but how badly we do is more importantnot only because our guys get killed and maimed and our country suffers but also because hidden within the losses and mistakes are the keys to winning the next battle and ultimately the war.

In order to win the War on Terror we need to look at things as they truly happen and not as we wish them to be. We covered our eyes after Nasiriya when it should have alerted us to all the things that were going to go wrongbad intelligence, bad communications, bad gear, bad leadership, bad training, ill-prepared soldiers, and flawed rules of engagement.

This book takes a hard look at the stuff that has gone wrongon the battlefields abroad and right here at homein the hopes that we will be able to take from them the things we need to know to prevent the next attack.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

People who recognize me from my appearances on the Fox News Channel often come up to me and ask, Colonel, where are we in the War on Terror? Im not a big fan of sugarcoating or bullshitting, so let me tell you, right here at the beginning, that I wont be putting a happy face on this war. I cant. Our brave soldiers, Marines, and Special Forces are doing amazing things for us, and many of them are giving their lives to protect us. We long to believe that the incredible things theyre doing are bringing us close to victory in this war. Hell, Id love to be able to tell you that were winning. But I cant do that. The truth is, the War on Terror is not going well, not well at all. Weve known from the beginning of this war that were engaged in a monumental struggle for our very survival, one that will take not months or years to win but decades. The way weve been fighting, however, doesnt make it seem like we get that. Not at all.

Its not just Iraq. Weve got huge problems in Afghanistan. The rest of the Middle East is screwed up. Weve badly mishandled Iran and North Korea. (Can you say Axis of Evil?)

In 2005, I wrote a book called They Just Dont Get It because I was scared and pissed off. I knew we were making mistakes in the War on Terror and I tried to show how we could win the war and protect ourselves better. Our leaders needed to make some big changes, and fast.

Sadly, though, they still dont get it.

Dont get me wrongweve done some great things in the War on Terror. Anyone who denies our successes is a fool or, worse, trying to score political points. Just look at some of our achievements:

Our armed forces have heroically taken the fight to the terrorists in back alleys and caves around the world. They fight in the frigid cold and lung-destroying altitudes of Afghanistan, and in 125-degree, hot-enough-to-fry-an-egg-on-your-helmet heat in Iraq.

Weve given other countries a chance at this thing we call freedom. In Afghanistan more than 12.5 million people, including 6 million women, have registered to vote. Iraq has held free elections for the first time in history.

We have inoculated the children of Iraq and rebuilt, or built from scratch, thousands of schools, hospitals, roads, and bridges.