"When Tulsi Gabbard returned to Hawaii in 2010, after her second deployment to the Middle East, she saw her own struggles mirrored in other young veterans. The strain of her first deployment had already torn apart the 29-year-old's marriage. Now she saw distress across Oahu's military community: broken families, part-time soldiers wracked with mental illness and returning reservists who found themselves homeless.
Assigned to command a National Guard company, Gabbard was tasked with helping reservists who were trying to readapt to life back home and with readying them to go back to war. Some had suicidal thoughts. She asked senior officers to take it easy on them and give them "a little grace," said Col. Phoebe Inigo, who served with Gabbard in Hawaii and said those days were formative for her fellow officer.
"We were definitely pumping people out left and right, receiving them back, and pushing them out the door," said Inigo. "There's a price once you start putting boots on the ground, and that price is, ultimately, lives."
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a generation of young Americans enlisted to fight the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) -- a sprawling conflict from the Middle East to Africa. What began as a battle to dislodge al Qaeda from Afghanistan expanded to Iraq and then spiraled into what critics came to call "the forever wars."
Now, Generation GWOT is set for the first time to take over some of the most powerful positions in the U.S. government. President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to hand over major military and intelligence posts to people whose experience in that conflict has made them deeply skeptical of America's security role abroad.
In addition to Gabbard, 43, whom he picked to be his director of national intelligence, he also chose as his vice president JD Vance, 40, who served in Iraq, and Pete Hegseth, 44, who was deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, to run the Pentagon. (Hegseth's nomination appeared to be in trouble this week, amid allegations related to his treatment of women and excessive drinking.)
All have said they want to change how the U.S. wields power in the world. Their selection poses a critical question: Can a team with such deep distrust of America's national security institutions, and little management experience, effectively run them?
A spokeswoman for the Trump transition said Gabbard would "protect our national security and defend against any effort to use the work of our intelligence agencies as weapons against the American people." Another transition spokesman said the team stood by Hegseth's nomination. "For too long, the Pentagon has been led by people who lose wars," Vance wrote Friday on X. "Pete Hegseth is a man who fought in those wars."
Trump's rise to power was itself fueled by public disillusionment over the failure of the American military to achieve what Washington had promised, said historian Andrew Bacevich, professor emeritus at Boston University. But it's unclear how the veterans he has tapped for senior posts would react in the face of a foreign crisis that demands a military response, said Bacevich, whose own son was killed while serving in Iraq. "We are pretty clear on what they're against, but they don't seem to know yet what they're for," he said.
In Iraq, Vance, then 21, was tasked with writing brief articles and taking photos for internal Marine Corps publications meant to keep up morale, said retired Maj. Brad Avots, who was his commander. The base where he was stationed was reasonably safe, Marines who deployed with him said, but he would occasionally go "outside the wire" for days at a time to cover U.S. forces trying to build local infrastructure.
Vance was shaken by what he saw: American troops killed and injured, U.S. tax dollars spent to rebuild a nation that wanted the U.S. out and a burgeoning insurgency aligned with the very group that had attacked Americans on 9/11.
Returning to the U.S., Vance felt profoundly disillusioned with the war effort. "I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world," Vance wrote in a 2020 essay. "I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it."
After al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, "a lot of people wondered, why are we still over here? What are we doing?" remembers Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL who deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq and hosts an influential podcast that often delivers blistering critiques of the wars. During the presidential campaign, he interviewed Vance, Gabbard and Hegseth and supported their selection by Trump, saying he hopes they will break the cycle of U.S. politicians who just want to "spin us back up, kick us back out the door and go back to war."
Launched at an apex of American patriotic fervor, the Global War on Terrorism mired U.S. soldiers in decades of violent struggle against shadowy insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. More than 7,000 Americans died in the conflicts, with over 50,000 wounded. As time passed and the wars dragged on for two decades, the initial justifications for putting them in harm's way felt increasingly unconvincing to many veterans.
Once back home, many saw little benefit for the U.S. after decades of casualties. They often returned to communities gripped by economic malaise and the fentanyl crisis, which disproportionately affected young veterans.
Such views took hold in particular on the right, said Krister Knapp, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis who studies the Global War on Terrorism. "When they came home, what they saw was a worse America," he said. Today's conservative veteran leaders sometimes echo left-wing antiwar critics, who have warned for decades that a "military-industrial complex" manipulates the U.S. to fight unjust wars for commercial gain.
This worldview led some in the cohort to what once would have been a surprising place for American conservatives: opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine or even sympathy for Russia. "I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to," Vance said on the Senate floor in April. "My excuse is that I was a high-school senior. What is the excuse of many people who are in this chamber and are now singing the exact same song when it comes to Ukraine? Have we learned nothing?"
After graduating from Princeton in 2003, Hegseth deployed to Samarra in northern Iraq, an insurgency hotbed. His regiment's commander, Michael Steele, was a controversial figure, who told his troops to focus on killing the enemy above all else, undercutting U.S. efforts to protect civilians.
The regiment's Charlie Company, which included Hegseth, employed such aggressive tactics that it was referred to by some as the "Kill Company," and army investigators said Steele gave troops improper orders. Four of the company soldiers were court-martialed on charges of killing unarmed Iraqis.
Shortly after returning home, Hegseth argued that he and his comrades were often hamstrung by generals and politicians far from the front lines. Over time, he defended increasingly aggressive wartime actions by troops, successfully lobbied for pardons for some of them and spoke with increasing disdain for the policymakers who sent them to fight.
As for Gabbard, her experience in the Global War on Terrorism led her to foreign policy and national security positions that many critics see as contradictory or erratic. While condemning U.S. involvement in "wasteful foreign wars," she has described herself as both a "hawk" and a "dove." She has expressed skepticism toward the findings of the U.N. and U.S. intelligence agencies that Syria's President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against civilians. And she outraged members of both parties by secretly meeting in 2017 with Assad, whose regime has committed mass killings during the country's civil war.
On the eve of events in Ukraine, Gabbard posted a video calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to "put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha" while warning that Washington's support of Kyiv provoked Russia and could lead to nuclear war.
For years, Republican and Democrat critics have labeled her views as "fringe," "dangerous" and even "traitorous."
Neal Milner, a retired University of Hawaii political science professor who has followed Gabbard's career, said that while her military experience may have shaped her antiwar view, "The way she chose to express it was highly political and highly unorthodox."
In interviews and social-media posts, Gabbard has invoked a familiar Kremlin talking point by blaming NATO's expansion in recent decades for events in Ukraine. She has also echoed Moscow in warning of the dangers of U.S.-funded biological labs in Ukraine.
The Kremlin has charged that the U.S. is helping Ukraine research dangerous pathogens, when in fact the funds are for securing biological materials and preventing disease outbreaks.
Many of Gabbard's geopolitical views are common among GWOT veterans, says David Silbey, a Cornell University historian who studies how countries have responded to terrorism. They believe, he said, that a callous foreign policy elite in Washington unjustly asked them to fight in unwinnable wars. Now they ask: "Are we going to intervene in Syria? We're sort of helping out in Ukraine. Are we going to get sucked into another thing?"
If confirmed, Gabbard would oversee 18 intelligence agencies with a budget of roughly $100 billion. Her nomination has been met with alarm by many of the career officials she would be leading. Her views on the actions of Russia and Syria have often starkly diverged from the intelligence community's assessments.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said in an interview that he had concerns about Gabbard's public positions on Russia and Syria "as well as about sometimes her willingness to be supportive of people who've leaked classified information."
Gabbard has criticized surveillance tools the U.S. government sees as crucial to national security and defended former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who U.S. intelligence officials say endangered national security by exposing classified government information.
She has also supported WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who pleaded guilty earlier this year to conspiring to obtain and distribute classified information, over the website's publication of thousands of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables about America's actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2020, she introduced a bill opposing his extradition to the U.S. on the charges.
Gabbard has dismissed accusations that her views mirror Russian propaganda. "When powerful, influential people make baseless accusations of treason, a crime punishable by death, in order to intimidate, silence and censor those who speak the truth," she said on Twitter in 2022, "it has a chilling effect on our democracy."
The officers who served with Gabbard said that her core views about the perils of excessive American interventionism were shared by many veterans who saw the damage that prolonged conflict inflicted on communities back home. "We understand the results of this stuff. We see them. We know how many people will die when these things happen. It's catastrophic," said Matt Moore, an officer who served under Gabbard.
Gabbard was a 21-year-old freshman state legislator in Hawaii, the youngest ever, when the U.S. went to war with Iraq in 2003. A month after the bombing started, she joined the National Guard. When her name didn't come up for deployment to Iraq the following year, she volunteered, withdrawing from her re-election campaign and pausing her promising political career.
She was assigned to a medical unit at Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, a staging ground for U.S. forces. Every day, she would pass under a sign that read "IS TODAY THE DAY?" It was "an ever-present reminder that any day could be our last," she would later say in a podcast. Her first duty each morning was to check the latest roster of casualties to see if anyone from the brigade she supported had been wounded.
"It was tough seeing the names of people I knew, and there were a lot of people who I didn't know, but understanding with every one of those names, there's a loved one or a family or a child back home who were worried sick about them," Gabbard said in a veterans' podcast last year.
In interviews, her superiors and charges alike described an officer with an uncanny ability to develop close connections with her soldiers, mixing a politician's knack for remembering children's names with a charming humility that stood in stark contrast to her sometimes brash public political statements.
The officers said that Gabbard didn't bring up her political views when she was on duty. "She was out with them in the mud, in the suck, in the rain at 4 a.m. and at 10 p.m.," Moore said.
In 2011, Gabbard called Inigo to tell her she was running for Congress against a veteran Hawaiian politician. "Are you sitting down?" Inigo said Gabbard asked. Gabbard later said her experiences with veterans had made her believe that Congress had abdicated its job to responsibly oversee the use of military force. These views also spurred her run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. At a primary debate, she called for "an end to this ongoing Bush-Clinton-Trump foreign policy doctrine of regime change wars, overthrowing dictators in other countries, needlessly sending my brothers and sisters in uniform into harm's way to fight in wars that actually undermine our national security and have cost us thousands of American lives."
As Gabbard and others are tested in confirmation hearings, their fellow GWOT veterans say they'll be watching closely, as more of them seek to enter political office in the years to come.
"This is my peer set," Evan Hafer, a former Green Beret who has become a kind of influencer for special forces soldiers and their fans, said on a recent podcast. "All these GWOT guys that are getting appointed to these positions: Pete, Tulsi, JD. . . . like they fundamentally know what war is."" [1]
1. REVIEW --- The Angry Iraq Vets Who Want To Upend U.S. Foreign Policy --- Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance and Pete Hegseth came back from service in the Global War on Terrorism determined to change America's role in the world. Schectman, Joel; Youssef, Nancy A; Bergengruen, Vera. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 07 Dec 2024: C.1.
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