Military Service Members Reflect on Afghanistan: Past, Present, and Future

seats and join me in welcoming our two announcers for the evening ryan tierney and abia khan representing harvard rotc program [Applause] good evening everyone and welcome to today's john f kennedy jr forum at the institute of politics tonight we will be reflecting on the war in afghanistan its impact on the lives of service members and the indelible influence this had on our nation my name is ryan tierney i'm a sophomore studying history and literature living in leverett house and i'm also midshipman in harvard's old ironsides naval rotc battalion my name is ibiya khan i'm a sophomore studying government math and education living in dunster house i'm also a cadet in the paul revere army rotc battalion like many young americans we have always known war in afghanistan there's never been a time in our lives where our country hasn't been at war when we were born in the wake of 9 11 the worst terrorist attack to ever take place on u.s soil my dad was teaching me to ride a bike thousands of u.s troops were flying to afghanistan for the surge in 2009 when i was sitting in classrooms going to swim practices and learning to be a man a fellow american was standing watch across the world through the lens of the news camera or the pen of the reporter we learned about the war in afghanistan and as we grew up the war grew with us now we have come of age and we are honored to be joined by a group of service members from our harvard community to whom we can look for new perspectives mr thomas bishop an mpa candidate at the harvard kennedy school and graduate of the university of arkansas is a u.s army reserve officer with nearly 20 years of enlisted and commissioned military service miss shalane etchan etchason a mpa and mba candidate at hks and a graduate of the university of central florida served 11 years in the us army where she conducted security intelligence and combat functions in special operations in military police units mr soren dugan an mpa candidate at hks and a graduate of columbia university served for nine years in the united states army where you operate in multi-faceted intelligence collection roles for us special operations mr joseph stinger iii is an mba and mba candidate at hks who after earning his commission through embry riddle aeronautical university's air force rotc program flew 77 combat missions in support of operation enduring freedom and collaborated with over 100 afghan women to form nonprofits that empower girls in education and employment mr edward figueroa a belford national security fellow and a graduate of fordham university is a united states army foreign office area officer who specialized in western hemisphere political military affairs we are also honored to be joined by our moderator mr seti warren the executive director of the institute of politics at the harvard kennedy school prior to this role he served as the executive director of the shorenstein center on media politics and public policy the mayor of newton massachusetts and an iraq war veteran mr mr warren served as an intelligence specialist in the u.s naval reserves thank you all very much for joining us tonight and we hope you enjoy the [Applause] everyone discussion great to be with you welcome to the john f kennedy junior forum for this incredibly important conversation i want to just do one thing before we begin i'd like you to give a round of applause to these extraordinary members of the armed forces and and all the work they've done please give them a round of applause so as i reflected upon this conversation this evening i i thought about the time when i returned home from my service in iraq in 2008 i did a year-long deployment and i'll never forget civilians brothers and sisters family members saying thank you for your service while i appreciated that very very much i wondered if there was some way i could share with them what it was really like on the ground in a combat zone if i could share with them the experiences the relationships what i saw if i could share them with everyday people civilians voters public policy makers elected officials perhaps those decision makers and all walks of our society would make sounder decisions when it comes to sending troops into harm's way and that's what this conversation is about this evening it's about having real life service members who did extraordinary things overseas not just in in afghanistan but in other parts of the world share their life perspective their views their their experiences with you all future public policy makers leaders voters people who will make decisions about who makes decisions in regards to the military our defense and foreign policy hearing from those who served on the ground so with that we're going to get into a conversation um first and then after we do we're going to open up the floor for questions from you all but we're going to dive right into uh to to this conversation so eddie i want to just start with you you've had an incredible journey in the military i really would love to focus on afghanistan and i'd i'd love for you to share your experiences and what you think people need to know about those experiences what you saw in afghanistan thank you everybody hear me all right okay yeah i just want to kind of set the set the sound like a robot right i kind of want to set the stage september 11 2001 i was in new york city as a student doing my undergrad when uh when that day happened just like everybody uh the initial uh notice that a plane had hit uh one of the world towers everybody thought it was one of these cessna airplanes uh taking tourists around the city when the second airplane hit um i knew that the world had changed and i think uh like most of us made a decision decision to join the military and serve my country could you hear me now thank you yep so september 11th really changed my life it was like every new yorker it was personal [Music] and like many americans decided that i wanted to serve a few years later uh first deployment to iraq then a few years later afghanistan i had the honor to command and be an operations officer in afghanistan in 2010 to 2011 during the surge in kandahar city um our mission was or my mission was i had a charlie med company it's a medical company it's a field hospital and my responsibility as the commander was to set up level two care for our brigade which is probably four thousand plus uh service members to include our afghan partners in a vast area in the in kandahar that responsibility was to get that service member or that person injured injured from point of injury to our level two care and then in an upper echelon more to level three care and and and get them to safety it was critical because the uh the terrain um the injuries that we saw were really due to improvised explosive devices so a lot of the injuries that we saw we saw multiple amputations and these great americans uh were saving our battle buddies life which was in modern medicine was extraordinary we called it the fif the platinum uh 15 minutes um everybody talks about that golden hour we have to get that person from point and injury uh to get them stabilized but to get a service member that has multiple triple amputees and save their lives to something extraordinary um very challenging year um we averaged um there was uh one company that averaged about a platoon of service members with which is about 65 uh service members that were either an amputee or double or triple amputee and if you study the history in afghanistan the arghandab river valley was somewhere where every major occupying force was beat up by by the afghans the russians were beat up there even alexander the great so coming into this area for the first time as americans uh was something that we all had in mind um we'll continue to to talk about some of our experiences but i want to give the floor to my to my battle buddies but that is uh that was our primary mission while we were in afghanistan all right all right thanks eddie um you know many of my views are going to be expressed by eddie and by shawan and the rest of the panel so i want to use my time to talk about the current efforts that veterans have in evacuating our allies that are stuck in afghanistan to this day when it became evident that afghanistan was going to fall a few things had happened the first is panicked afghans who had spent the last 20 years supporting the u.s forces there through interpreters or in a variety of capacities scrambled went into hiding and scrambled to reach out to the us veterans that they knew because they knew that they would be systematically hunted and killed by the taliban those veterans the second thing that happened happened to be junior officers and non-commissioned officers like the people you see in the stage because we were the ones that interacted with him the most when we were in afghanistan they reached out to us and within a few hours literally of getting these barrage of phone calls tens of thousands of phone calls and text messages the year veterans organized we didn't know each other we had never worked with one another before but we were organized in order to form these evacuation efforts uh in afghanistan and this became known as digital dunkirk now the thing that i want you guys there's three maybe four depending on the time i have left but three things primarily that i want you to know about digital dunkirk the first is that no matter what you think you know about how the evacuation went no matter how much you watched the news or plugged into online i promise you it was exponentially worse than you could possibly imagine the chaos the violence the carnage it was bad and it is bad you know we we organize ourselves into these groups on signal and i'm not going to share the names for security but one group would actually a great name for it would be screams for help and there are two stories that came across there that i will never forget as long as i live the first is one former interpreter who was uh received a special immigration visa to the united states his pregnant wife was beaten so badly at a taliban checkpoint that she went into labor on the streets of kabul and then the second and really heartbreaking was a message that read please help i have an infant with a traumatic brain injury stuck at north gate he's dying can someone please put us in touch with the medics inside of kabul airport to get medical help and the truth is i have no idea how those stories ended because for days up until today it's just text after text after text screaming for help from veterans that are doing this on our volunteer time and some of us when we're sitting in class here the reason it was so bad is because the sieve process is broken you know we we created a system for these people to come into the united states years ago and for whatever reason the average time it takes for them to work through the system is four years and i think that's conservative so it's a broken process and it's got to be fixed um the second thing that i want you all to know is that this is ongoing this is happening today i personally am trying to evacuate about 30 afghans just before i walked into this room i got to ask for help for safe houses in kabul and i'm not alone i imagine the people on this stage and in the classroom that you might be in class with are getting these text messages and responding in the middle of their finance class hey here's where i know a safe house is and let me hook you up with that it is ongoing and it will be ongoing for quite some time um and we could certainly use your support so if there's any if any of you want to pitch into the effort please find me after um thirdly and lastly is that we are doing this veterans and ngos and we're doing this on our own time on our own dime and we're doing it because we feel a sense of obligation to the people of afghanistan who have given us in the united states so much yes it didn't turn out the way that any of us wanted to it's heartbreaking to know that the women that we had put into school are now burning their diplomas because the taliban don't want because they risk being um attacked by the taliban for their education but we need to put we need to fix what was what we have broken or at least make some effort to fix what we have broken and we're doing that now through the evacuation effort and so i think i am out of time and appreciate it very much and i'm going to hand it over to shalane use this mic can everyone hear me got it um yeah i think joe's point segways into something that i continue to come back to with my experience with afghanistan and what i'm grappling with today and i know a lot of other veterans is reconciling with moral injury and especially the events that have happened and transpired over the last month has made that moral injury worse it has reopened wounds that we have tried to close since our time there so a little bit of context on who i am in my story and how afghanistan fits into my life uh september 11th happened when i was a sophomore in high school 15 years old i do not come from a military family at all but i i could not shake the notion that i wanted to be part of this effort i read the books i watched the news i joined rotc and kind of on a leap of faith i joined the army and i really took it seriously i was going to commit to this thing and in college i ended up graduating my program number one i joined the army specifically because i wanted to be on the ground i wanted to witness and partake in this effort firsthand now in 2008 when i graduated rt commissioned and graduated undergrad that was when the department of defense still very much had this women in combat ban policy so because i was a woman i was barred from about a third of the jobs available in the army at the time purely based on being a woman because these jobs their whole their whole essence was engaging in direct combat which i was not allowed from not allowed to participate in so um the best i could do is go military police at the time military police units were being deployed quite frequently to iraq they were doing things like convoy security missions or training the iraqi police so my first deployment was to iraq to ramadi my first three years in the army to include this deployment were not good i quickly became the alarm part of the alarmingly high statistics of women being subjected to sexual harassment assault my commander very much had bias against me and i was treated second class compared to my lieutenant peers i'd never felt this before i didn't grow up this way but it was very evident um not only were my leaders making me feel second class so was the institution i was barred from one third of the jobs so i had a chip on my shoulder i get back from iraq and uh something that i really wanted to be a part of being in the military serving my country avenging the attacks on september 11th timing worked out in 2011 the u.s army special operations command had announced a new pilot program called the cultural support teams the purpose of the cultural support teams were to specially assessed and select a small group of women to deploy to afghanistan with our special operations units navy seals special forces and the 75th ranger regiment so i took that chip on my shoulder had something to prove this program and deploying to afghanistan was it i made the cut i did a train up and in fall of september excuse me in fall of 2011 in august i deployed to afghanistan as one of the first women to embed with the 75th ranger regiment which they are the premier raid force for the us army my job was to go on night raids with the rangers as the only woman with them and tactically question and search the women and children on target our mission was to find high-value al-qaeda and taliban targets and because of cultural norms our male counterparts were not allowed to question the women so they had me to do that job now my experience in afghanistan was very much twofold myopically looking at me i felt like what i was doing me and the 15 other women that were part of my group that we were stationed all around the country at different uh with different rangers or navy seals we we were there to prove that women could be in direct combat roles we weren't a liability we were americans wanting to serve our country just like the men we were beside that was very much my mission in afghanistan well mission number two was also our larger strategy of counter insurgency find the bad guys protect the homeland and those two did not match at all and it was very conflicting for me because i knew every single night when i'm going out on mission and i i got the critical piece of information or maybe i found a critical piece of intelligence i was building rapport and credibility and respect with these men who were very very skeptical about women being with them this was not easy this was very much a challenge for us but on the other side i knew that our tactics as a 25 year old who had not been to policy school yet here at kennedy school knew that this wasn't making sense every night what we are doing is scarring a child for life they are going to forever remember the night the americans kicked in their doors some people were killed and it was violent and i was a part of it and i knew we were creating more of an insurgency than what we were trying to thwart so there comes the moral injury and i on my deployment one of one of my colleagues she was killed in kandahar triple amputee two years later two more my girlfriends were killed in afghanistan and bringing this to today it's hard to make sense of the loss it's hard not to feel guilty that my female colleagues and i hey we answered the call we did in 2016 the women in combat band was rescinded women man if you meet certain standards you can go into combat jobs and our success in the csts very much had a part in that and i'm proud of that but a lot of my time in afghanistan i'm not not proud of that's not to say that there were many many good efforts going on joe with his ngos for women's education there were a lot of great civil affairs teams building roads infrastructure schools that wasn't my experience though so that's the moral injury part and what's happened in this last month it opens that wound and i've always thought i want to go back to afghanistan and do a little good to make up for my time there and the way we have left in this debacle and what has happened hurts so bad nope we're good oh there you go great um thank you shalane um so my name is soren duggan uh and i think i have um a kind of a different facet to add to the conversation i think we can all all five of us can sit here for this entire hour and talk about our experiences and give us our lessons learned and i would be surprised if they didn't overlap a lot in our final opinions about the war and about our our observations about afghanistan broadly um but i think that i can add some interesting facets about the taliban itself the al-qaeda members and teams that we went there initially to fight was our initial mission from my experiences over there i went for all of 2012 stationed with the defense intelligence agency and conducted interrogations out there of high value targets of taliban and al-qaeda guys in northeast afghanistan conducted a few hundred of them spent a few thousand hours speaking to guys who a few of which i have now seen on television over the last few weeks which is an alarming uh alarming thing to uh to see um i'm not sure they know my real name so maybe they might now but um i was i'm also a new yorker um i was lucky enough to be across the river in new jersey on 9 11. i was 11 years old uh and that that that day really stuck with me um come from a family um my stepfather saw a lot of nypd officers and one of the uh coveted retirement positions from the nypd is to be a security officer in the world trade center it's a nice work and air conditioning all day um and a lot of them uh perished that day it was a big big loss for a lot of members of my family and that that they stuck with me and it's the reason i joined when i was 19. um spent a few years training uh an intelligence collection deployed in 2012. um in about two weeks of speaking with a few uh taliban guys over there they start you out small you don't really get any cases that really mean anything for a bit but just speaking of those guys i realized very quickly how this war was going to end even even in 2012. um i knew it in 2012 i knew it a year ago i knew it today this i've never been so viscerally shocked by something that i have known was going to happen for nine years and that's been a very confusing conversation to have with myself and with others um we're the we're the fifth empire to fail to take afghanistan the fifth uh world power the first one was alexander the great about 2300 years ago and he is uh on record saying that afghanistan is a easy place to march into and a tough place to march out of and if that isn't applicable to our current issue i'm i'm not sure what is uh and that man didn't have a lot of problems uh marching in and out of anywhere up until afghanistan now he had just conquered the persian empire and had marched east i spoke to taliban men who had fought the russians and lived through that war lived for 30 years in a war-torn state that didn't have much uh there for it and had were fighting us and they sat in that they sat in that in that room with me i spoke to them about their plans um what they thought of the united states what they thought of me with the thought of russia and that war wasn't something that they fought in their own life on their own timeline they had children that would continue to fight it this was not something we we thought of this war in in in chunks of commanders right whether it was patriarchs mcchrystal um cocom commanders they were chunks of time where men commanded that war and that's the way that um three presidents thought of that they thought of this as a generational timeline and if we had thought going into there that we could outlast that or somehow defeat them where four other empires thought that they could that was that was a uh one of the biggest mistakes in in strategy and military strategy that i'm that i think that we've ever made um and i'm not you know obviously i was uh young in the military i was in any sort of you know pentagon planning rooms at that point um but i really wonder why or what we thought that we could do what we thought that we could accomplish with that and saying that i think it's important to highlight um especially for you know the soldiers and airmen that are here and especially for the ones that uh are no longer here there were two objectives in that country when we went in it wasn't just one it wasn't a nation-building exercise the first objective was to go in and find al qaeda teams destroy them and weaken that organization that had caused 911 and i think that it is really important if i have anything to say here to reinforce the fact that that mission itself was a wild success there was there have been many problems and how we executed that war we can have those tough conversations now it's good to look back and find those lessons learned but it's it's very important to remember especially for the soldiers that didn't come back from that country that that mission at the time had a mandate from our population and in my personal opinion was pulled off successfully the second mission that we had i think we all know didn't end well and that country reverted to what it was when we first got there it is an impossibly complex nation uh they don't view the borders those borders were drawn um a hundred and two years ago i suppose by the british and the french and the sykes pico they don't acknowledge those borders afghanistan isn't a thing it's pashtunistain and even that is a more nebulous idea uh it's not a province it's not district to district in many cases in that country it's not even tribe to tribe it's valid a valley and some people haven't even crossed the valley into the other one to speak to them in generations and so to think that we could go in there and build a force that'd be willing to die for something called afghanistan or a government that would be willing to govern something that we call afghanistan i think was incredibly foolish and i hope that the lessons that we learned from that mistake are brought forward um if and when this happens again whether it's in two weeks or 20 years that we can come together not just in the pentagon but in institutions like this and really learn those lessons so again i could i think we could all speak for an hour here so i'll cut it off but thank you for having us so i'm glad we started this conversation on 911 because that event shocked american consciousness and what we saw this last month shocked americans consciousness and what we're doing right now is having a subjective conversation about all of our all of our times there which were limited and it this is very subjective i can only tell you about what it was like for first lieutenant thomas bishop a platoon leader for a route clearance platoon that was supposed to find and clear ieds in afghanistan and your first month there you're not that good at it there are a lot of people who did a lot more and and left a lot more in that country there are humanitarian workers volunteers diplomats that also helped shape what we were doing there and i think that matters and i'm humbled that we were asked to come here and talk because we're just telling our little part of this story but that's the important part of what happened is that we we stopped talking because about less than 3 million 2.7 million people deployed during the the wars in iraq afghanistan syria we're still in kuwait we're still doing these things but there were about six million deployments that happened which meant reservists who were told will only send you when it's necessary and we're going to make sure that we limit that well that wasn't true and when you send these people when we talk about that 2.7 million that's less than one percent that's not the real number because their families went with them they're they're kids without mothers for a year and then two years later they went again and we we owe them something you know we owe them this conversation we owe making sure that they're mentally okay that they're physically okay that they have housing and and jobs and employments because they lose them it's hard for jobs to see you leave not feel it fill the job or feel it and and have to have somebody leave that job who they trained up when you come back that's the conversation that we have to have when we send americans to war i was a lieutenant i cannot tell you about policy i cannot tell you about what the right thing or the wrong thing to do what happened this last month was we were able to do something that we've never seen before but that now comes with a responsibility when you when you bring tens of thousands of people to a place you have to make sure that they're okay afghanistan is not what you think it is it's not a place with infrastructure with you know police officers that you can call up like that's not what that is so when we talk about the shock that that we saw when people when it didn't go well we shouldn't have been shocked but we didn't know what it was because we stopped talking we never did you know i we meet each other and we'll talk for four hours at a bar and we know each other's stories but the rest of the the american consciousness doesn't until something like this happens and so i think for me my story is subjective i can tell you about bombs all the time and trying to do different things but it really is the fact that nobody cared until a few weeks ago what that story was thank you for that just i want to do a short follow-up but before i do if you want to ask a question there are microphones over here here i think there's two up in the balconies there if you want to step to the microphone we're happy to take your questions um just two things that that i heard in your reflections one is the internal conflict that you had many of you regarding whether it was the leadership shallaine that you talked about that you had to sort of kind of deal with that didn't deal with your situation with assault and harassment but yet you stayed in it and you kept working at it uh whether you know bishop it occurs to me that you you mentioned what happens when people come home and the families uh and and how the united states has a responsibility there and the work you know that you're doing joe and soaring what you've seen and and eddie i know uh you had mentioned me you got injured but yet you all stayed in the military you believed in what you were doing individually you believed in the collective and and one another um and that's a general recurring theme that i heard so with that being said i wonder if um i want to shift to the takeaways from these experiences that you've had in afghanistan in these wars in this particular war if you were to articulate the lessons learned or take away with the complexities that you all face what do people need to know anyone can jump in eddie if you want to yeah i'll start um first uh i just want to say uh and i get to say soldiers because we're all soldiers here in this panel but we're not politicians um we are an instrument of of war we're an instrument of foreign policy and no man or woman who has never set foot on a battlefield can truly understand what it takes to be on it once the fight starts there's only winning or losing or living and dying and uh and on april 14th 2011 i learned that lesson the hard way um the the takeaway that i want to reflect on is tomorrow's not promised um when an rpg detonated next to me um that day was one of the most complex attacks that we have seen during my rotation more than five vehicle-borne ids were involved in trying to overrun our combat outpost multiple dismounted enemy with suicide vests rpg gunners and the enemy really tried to penetrate our combat outpost with a vehicle born id and then the dismounted enemy would come in and run towards soldiers and try to detonate but once i got injured and i laid there and i realized how foolish it was to think that death cared about my life plans as i layered there i learned that dying wasn't scary it was just sad i was supposed to have more time that's what i kept thinking to myself i felt overwhelming regret knowing that i wasn't going to be able to be that husband that father that i've always wanted to be i remember the night before talking to my wife and trying to talk to my three-year-old son and anybody that has a little boy at three knows he has no attention span and me being frustrated because he wouldn't stay on the phone and talk with daddy um luckily for me i was given a second chance and not everybody gets a second chance some of our brothers and sisters didn't make it back but i say to you take that chance if you ever have doubts on doing a specific thing don't wait till tomorrow do it today go home hug that person a significant other other hug your husband wife significant other your kids tell them you love them because tomorrow is not promised and that is definitely a lesson learned that that i live today i try to live my my life in honor of of my battle buddies that didn't make it back um war has a human domain factor that a lot of people don't understand right when we go to war um we're not really thinking about you know those strategic strategies of strategic objectives that we have to achieve we're thinking about our buddies who are left and or right um i eddie thank you for sharing that intimate portrait when you were talking when you watch the news at night you see these numbers of casualties and people wounded and their numbers but there are people behind those they're numbers human being behind those numbers injuries and you know as you spoke i think we all need to understand that and realize that these aren't just data points um please does anyone want to step in and share lessons learned from your perspective i think it'll help clear my throat so one of going back to kind of the story i shared where there's that dichotomy of my mission i am i am doing something that's advancing the cause of like service women but it is coming at a cost of something of poor strategy ruining lives people losing their lives one of my lessons learned or like large reflections that i have um is how does that apply to our senior leaders and where do we need to check some greed or selfishness in the name of professional advancement in the name of it's your time to be the commander and to lead and and the amount of courage that it takes for people to recognize when to say hey the path we're on is not working we don't need more troops here perhaps we need to have a smart withdrawal perhaps we need to rethink our strategy and course i i think even at the junior soldier level there's something exciting about deploying there's something that's a little selfish about the adventure and the thrill of choosing the profession of arms and i have to believe that the uh the folks wearing stars on their chest feel the same way they have been in uniform for 30 years waiting for their time to be the commander of this and that and um and i think when that goes unchecked by civilian oversight civilian leaders the constituents citizens of our country we get award that goes on for two decades so i think big lesson learned is we need to check ourselves and our country was founded on checks and balances for a reason and i think they were lots of times absent in this conversation on afghanistan joe did you yeah and leadership positions in the united states military and and ngo politics in general part of the problem with these strategies is that they are propagated by these old boys clubs that just reinforce the sense of arrogance and this lack of of just critical i don't say critical thinking but criticism and so we need more women in positions of leadership in the air um in the air force and in all of the army uh and all the military and then in uh and then geopolitics as well um just quickly my my main thing my main takeaway from afghanistan is just how important the role that women play in societies like afghanistan and how much how critical how their empowerment is critical to the stability of those communities it's not something that i thought about before deploying i was a 28 year old fighter pilot um who only cared about flying airplanes and over the last 10 years working with ngos and non-profits and with hundreds of afghan women it it's apparent to me that there is a direct connection between women's equality and empowerment and their ability to hold leadership positions in their community and that community's success so i think that's my main takeaway thank you very much sir did you have a question hello okay awesome um thank you all so much for joining us tonight um in a very thoughtful conversation my name is stephanie lin i am a sophomore here at the college and one of the student members of the jfk committee here at the iop the war in afghanistan has left an unforgettable impact in the communities abroad and here at home and i wanted to ask you know from your perspective um what is your vision for america's armed forces and military activity going forwards in the future and i think as expressed across the board and all the sentiments tonight war has a very very heavy cost and so i want to ask what do you wish to see in our approach towards conflict and resolution going forwards the words you said were were unforgettable impact that's that's what i hope this is is we remember what happened so that now and in the future we we think about training and equipping today making sure that people are okay today and then when they deploy we think we don't forget about how they're living and what the war actually looks like when they're there and making sure that we check on those families and that they have a community an entire american community when they deploy again and when they get back we take care of them and their families i hope that is the legacy and what we do with the people that we've we've brought to this country that can be a legacy too our story isn't over i hope people get that this isn't over yet you know we can talk about winning and losing but what we do with people matters and if we can do it for them if we can ship people from afghanistan to america what can we do for the lowest here that we have here now it's not a it's not a ore or a but it's an and we we can do both so i i hope that's what the legacy is i think um you know people have said in government especially leaders you know um at the federal level said that in these in these war planning rooms some of the biggest doves in the rooms are the ones that had gone and seen conflict and i think that that's pretty apparent we've had a lot of conflict been driven by civilians and bureaucrats who have not joined the military and not seen that conflict the civilian military divided in the department of defense is real there's a big history of that i i do believe in that um but i also think it's important to take men and women who have seen combat um like all five of us have um and seen violence and seen what conflict is the the loss is not just soldier to show soldier to soldier or fighter to fighter there's there's second and third order effects of of war that are um much much more difficult uh for me to think about i lived i went to syria in in 2017 i lived next to uh the third largest city in syria at that point which was a unesco refugee camp on the jordanian border it's about 120 000 refugees there and the things i saw in that refugee camp and coming out of the out of that refugee camp are far worse than the uh than the things i saw in combat or violence um it's important to note that i guess my my my point being is that you have these amazing soldiers airmen marines um sailors that have that have gone to war scene combat engaged in in foreign policy in that in that realm that are coming back now that i think can give a lot of lessons learned to policymakers the military we spend a lot of money on the military i do think that it can be a force for peace um there is peace through diplomacy but force backs diplomacy um ike eisenhower became president and that's how he governed us as president was diplomacy backed by force i think that there is that there is an option there to use that but i hope that moving forward um especially after afghanistan and after iraq that we use our military more as a as a force to keep peace uh and to prevent conflict and having seen conflict all five of us i think given the opportunity and given the choice we would do anything that we can to prevent a conflict in the future knowing firsthand uh what it is like thank you we'll go over here all right thank you all for being here and for your service uh colonel this is a question for you um thanks so much for your service and being vulnerable to sharing your personal story that really is what true strength is about if a young american came up to you when you're in uniform knowing what you know now about what happened in afghanistan and coming towards the end of it and said you know what what do you do how would you answer that question do you tell a story thanks thank you thank you that's a great question and uh and i do tell a story and i tell my story i'm a kid from puerto rico that his first language was spanish my father my great-grandfather um all served in the military all have high school education and we lived in this i call it a vicious cycle right they were all they were all poor um not educated they couldn't break that cycle what the army gave me gave me opportunities right i'm here at harvard today because it because because uh because of the army the army paid all my education two masters send me to learn a third language i got to i've been stationed in four u.s embassies been a full mill advisors to ambassadors and to generals so yes the army's not perfect but it gives you opportunities it gives you opportunities to serve your country and that responsibility is you can't get that anywhere else that the lesson to lead america gives us their national treasures their sons and daughters and puts them under our responsibility what greater responsibility is that so if any young american wants to serve i will say a hundred percent serve your country and uh what what an awesome opportunity to to serve this country and where the nation's cloth so yeah anytime thank you [Music] is this on all right good evening uh thank you all for coming we really appreciate it my name is luis esteva suero i'm a sophomore here at the college and one recurring theme that lieutenant colonel figueroa and mr bishop you both emphasized what all of you touched on is this idea that there is a disconnect between the american public and a true understanding of the experiences and the situations on the ground where the american military goes and my question for all of you is what is the way that we can start bridging this gap is it the responsibility of the public of the civilians to seek out these stories and truly engage them is it the responsibility of the media to portray a more candid portrayal of america abroad how do you guys see us resolving this issue that has led to so many misunderstandings throughout our nation's history so i have a few ideas um i think it's easy to use the media as as the boogeyman sometimes but when you think about what we've become today you know when was the last time you saw a lot of military people in a parade you know their their junior rotc programs are getting fewer and fewer between between a lot more colleges don't have rotc programs on campus and even service members are told if you can change before you before you leave the base and make sure you know for for national security implications as well but you don't see them in the airport and all of these other places so we're disappearing you don't know that you're supposed to ask you don't know that we're supposed to talk you know we don't even know how our military is made up a lot of people don't know that people who are not yet citizens can be a part of our military and they're serving and they're doing good works so you know at the individual level you have to ask you have to you have to find those things but in our institutions as well we have to make a choice on what we're going to embrace and you have to embrace those things we're we're not just in instruments of destruction we are implements of american foreign policy we are you so if we aren't of you that's a problem and that's that's been part of what we've seen is we aren't of each other and we've kind of pushed away from the military in a lot of different instances and it's been personal institutional and it's got to change if we want to make sure that it doesn't look that way in the future thank you so much for sharing your stories tonight especially charlene i wanted to thank you for your story really resonated with me i wanted to touch on the role of private contractors because one thing that we talked about earlier was how all of you were nodding your heads when you were saying you could have seen this end of the war coming for the past nine years a lot of military people have been saying that in the past month and we talked a little about the hyper masculine culture of senior government and military officials that are kind of prolonging this war um what role do private military contractors have in that and what was your experience with them on the ground thank you so i flew the f-35 which is built by lockheed martin and potentially one of the you know i won't say too much but one of the most um glaring examples of how the military industrial complex has potentially gotten out of control um does is there a machine behind the scenes potentially propagating the i mean i can't say one way or the other i would assume so but what i can say is that you know there do need to be checks and balances in place on the military-industrial complex specifically when it comes to weapons acquisitions and creation you know to make sure there's levels of accountability there's that you don't end up with i mean i can say it now that i'm out in f-35 that has a trillion dollar program that could go into social programs that we need um but it's just not a great not a great machine but was able to be made because it's built in all 50 states or at least 46 of them and just no one asks any questions so i i feel that i feel right anyone else want to answer that question i mean if i can play devil's advocate just a little bit and i don't want to but we we also have to remember that when we went to war you know in world war one and world war ii the military did everything so the people who brought the food who brought the the petroleum all of these things where you needed uh multiple million person military a lot of those things are done by contractors and third party nationals because we don't fight that way anymore if you don't want that to exist it means we all go to war and i'm not saying that's a good or bad thing but that's what that that's what happens in most countries when they have to go to wars everybody goes everybody loses something everybody sacrifices and now we're able to do that so that the public doesn't feel it as much i do i know i know we're a minute over time but i think it's in that same vein so when i got out i got out of the military at the end of 2018 i did a year of private contracting before i i went to school and um it was all domestic stuff but it was a it was a position um that kind of required some really specific expertise and a few credentials that take a long time to get in the military you don't really receive outside of the military they're difficult credentials to get they take a lot of time they're long courses and those positions that the position that i filled would have had to have been filled by a soldier and taken out of the fight to put in to put um you know domestically to organize these missions trying to speak around a bit but um you know that's a that's a scenario in which private contracting i think is useful right because you can take somebody out that doesn't want to go back into combat or is getting out of the military and wants to have a few years of buffer or whatever it may be and it's a really nice way to to do that i think that it's important to separate what happened during the the bush years and the war crimes that were committed by by private contractors in iraq that it's important to note that that that time really is over we i it is unfortunate that it happened i you know i don't think enough justice has come out of that personally um but that those are some some bloody lessons that we learned that i think the the realm is a little different now than it than it used to be i do think in in your point it is wildly overbloated and we are spending way too much money on it i don't think anybody will argue with that that does need to be rained in um wholeheartedly so well we could go on for another hour or two um but we can't unfortunately um before i wrap up i want to thank um the center for public leadership here um and the black family fellows as well as national security fellows from belfor uh we co-partnered on this event with the speakers and the panel so i want to thank both of those centers i also want to thank andrew webster i think that's you back there i got you on with the mass i've only seen you on the screen chair of the armed forces committee at the harvard kennedy school and i want to thank our dean who really supported this event and wanted this event to happen school-wide this has been a remarkable discussion and to conclude i was thinking about the comment or question that was made by one of the questioners which is whose responsibility is it to make sure we share military experiences service members experience on the ground with civilian and public policy makers one is you have these remarkable remarkable people here in your midst here at the kennedy school you should take advantage of them being in your midst every single day there's a real opportunity for you all to do that the second thing i would say is you heard some pretty difficult painful comments and stories as well as some realities and experiences from the five panelists here that you should build on and think about and reflect upon there was a lot that was said here um so i want to really give a great word of thanks for the five people on this panel for their service to this country through all that they've been through and for participating and sharing tonight this is a real terrific panel thank thank you have a good night everyone thank thank you you

Channel: Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics

Views: 618

Rating: 4.7894735 out of 5

Keywords: Harvard Institute of Politics, Harvard University

Id: Er8pIy6YYZg

Length: 77min 10sec (4630 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021