Daniel L. Davis
Serving officers don’t publicly dissent. It simply isn’t done. The Army value of “loyalty” is supposed to mean that soldiers are loyal to the Army itself and to their fellow troopers. In practice, however, loyalty tends to require subordinates to endorse what “the boss” says, regardless of whether the boss is right or wrong. Those willing to adhere to the first definition while bucking the second tend to be few in number.
On February 5, 2012, the Armed Forces Journal and the New York Times simultaneously published two articles involving me. The first was a piece I wrote describing my just-completed deployment to Afghanistan, where I found that rosy official statements by US military leaders bore no resemblance to the abysmal conditions on the ground. The second, written by New York Times reporter Scott Shane, addressed the unusual nature of what I was doing: a high-ranking officer on active duty taking public his criticism of an ongoing war.
My journey from being an enthusiastic young soldier who loved the Army and believed in its leaders to one who was willing to publicly challenge the institution’s top officials in a time of war was a long and painful one. Even now, years after retirement, I still love the Army, value the more than two decades I spent in it, and cherish the men and women who wear the Army fatigues. But I have been thoroughly purged of the naïveté that characterized my initial enlistment.
The truth, as Jesus said, will set you free. It can also hurt deeply.
I began my career in the US Army at the bottom, enlisting as a private in 1985. I had always planned on serving at least one tour of duty before entering the civilian workforce. I felt it was my moral obligation as a patriot to serve the country prior to pursuing my own career. My original plan was to spend two to four years in the military, then become a high school basketball and football coach. It didn’t take long, however, for me to realize that I really liked the Army life—and even had a knack for it.
I served only two years of my initial four-year enlistment before realizing that I wanted to become an officer. So I went back to Texas Tech University to complete my college degree and earn a commission through the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) as an Army second lieutenant. I reentered active duty in the summer of 1989 and attended the Field Artillery Officer Basic Course to learn the ins and outs of my assigned specialty. Upon graduation I joined my first combat unit: the highly respected 2nd Squadron, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, known as 2/2 ACR.
Prior to my arrival, I had never heard of the cavalry outside of movies about America’s frontier days. I quickly learned what being a modern cavalryman was all about: the 2/2 ACR was a firepower-heavy mix of tanks, armored infantry carriers, and mobile cannon. I loved it! I also loved that one of the primary mantras of the cavalry is: “When in doubt, move to the sound of the guns.” In other words, when orders are unclear, you drive toward the fighting and engage the enemy wherever you find him.
As a young lieutenant serving in Germany at the tail end of the Cold War, I found that mentality greatly appealing. And it suited my personality. Though never a star athlete, I played point guard on several US Army basketball teams, matching up against other Army posts and semipro club teams in Germany. I enjoyed directing the offense and found more pleasure in getting the ball to a teammate for an easy score than in racking up high point totals myself. But when the game was on the line, I always wanted the ball in my hands to take the shot.
In early 1990, my unit took part in sophisticated war games at the German training center of Hohenfels. During the exercise, Eagle Troop, my subunit of 2/2 ACR, performed brilliantly and crushed the enemy. Our commander, then-captain H. R. McMaster—who would later rise to the rank of lieutenant general and serve as President Trump’s national security advisor—was an exceptional tactician. He had prepared us so well, and provided field leadership so effectively, that we would all follow him anywhere in real combat.
Barely nine months later, we got our chance to do so. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, President George H. W. Bush immediately sent US troops to block Saddam’s presumed path to Saudi Arabia. By early 1991, my unit had been sent to the Middle East as part of the main counterattack force, and 2/2 ACR fought a pitched tank battle against the Iraqi Tawakalna Division. Eagle Troop performed under fire just as successfully as we had in training the year before.
I’ll admit that I did not hate the war. I found combat to be an intense emotional rush. I was so thrilled with tank warfare, in fact, that I would eventually change my branch from Field Artillery to Armor so that I could spend my career with these rolling behemoths.
In 1991, I did not question the need for the war I fought. As a young lieutenant, I mainly focused on performing my duties. I knew that Iraq had invaded another country, and that our president had said that fighting Saddam’s troops was necessary for America’s security. That was enough for me; I didn’t question it further.
That began to change after 9/11—though not right away. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, I still wasn’t asking any questions. Along with most of the rest of the country, I “knew” what had happened and what needed to be done: obey President George W. Bush’s orders to punish the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda. I did not have the slightest doubt that Bush sending the military to Afghanistan in October 2001 was the right thing to do.
By now a mid-level major, a staff officer assigned to the Pentagon, I soon realized that we were also about to initiate another war, targeting Iraq. Like many who fought in the 1991 war, I felt that we shouldn’t have stopped our advance short of Baghdad, that we left too early, and that it was a mistake to allow Saddam to remain in power. I had always believed we would be going back someday to “finish the job.” So when Bush told the American people that Saddam was a threat to our national security and that he had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that he could use against us, I didn’t hesitate to believe him.
I remember that many in Congress at the time were against the war. Still, in October 2002, the House of Representatives and the Senate both voted to authorize the use of military force against Iraq. The resolution passed comfortably, although there were still 133 votes against it in the House and 23 votes against in the Senate.
Almost all those nay votes were cast by Democrats, and at the time I dismissed them as mere partisan politics. There was far more opposition beyond our borders, however, especially from Germany and France. I remember thinking that once the invasion was complete and all those WMD found, the naysayers would realize how wrong they all had been. They’ll all be eating crow! I thought to myself. But as the dust cleared after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, and the days of occupation turned into weeks, there were still no WMD to be seen. That’s when I began to worry.
After several months of intensive searching throughout Iraq produced nothing, it finally became clear that there had never been any WMD at all. I remember thinking in early summer 2003, Oh my God. All those who voted against this war, all our allies who had been so adamant that there weren’t any WMD, they are all going to turn on us—because we just invaded and destroyed a country without justification! If the invasion had not been an act of self-defense, it violated the United Nations charter that the US government had signed at the end of World War II.
It was what happened next, though, that really shocked me. When the ostensible reason for invading Iraq vanished, most Americans just shrugged. Many devised an alternative rationale: “Saddam was a bad guy who deserved what he got.” The president simply ignored the glaring absence of WMD. That’s when things started changing for me. From that point forward, when it came to justifying war, I began to take almost nothing at face value. I would no longer merely take any leader at their word. Thenceforth, I would have to see independent evidence.
I continued working at the Pentagon until early 2005, when I was sent to my second combat deployment, this time in Afghanistan. Though many would later claim that the insurgency emerged in Afghanistan because Bush “took his eye off the ball” and diverted the war effort to Iraq in 2003, I saw firsthand that such views were inaccurate. In fact, by the summer of 2002, the Taliban had been eradicated as a viable military force; at that point, there was no need for US troops to be in Afghanistan at all. We could and should have ended the war right there and redeployed our soldiers. There was no longer an enemy to fight.
Instead, the number of US troops in the country swelled to about twenty thousand, and an insurgency began to fester. But even during my 2005 deployment, insurgents managed only sporadic, small-scale attacks, more a nuisance than anything else. In fact, I was able to drive safely to the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif in an ordinary unarmored pickup truck, without wearing body armor. Even the then-nascent Afghan security forces would have been able to keep the remnant of the Taliban at bay without a US presence. Why are we still in Afghanistan? I wondered.
AFTER MY AFGHANISTAN deployment and an eighteen-month tour in Germany, I was assigned to Future Combat Systems (FCS), the Army’s premier modernization program at the time. My confidence and trust in the Army’s senior leadership took another hit during this assignment.
Having already acquired a decent amount of combat experience, I identified serious flaws with FCS. I shared my concerns with senior leadership in the program and published a detailed assessment in the January 2008 edition of Armed Forces Journal, cataloging the problems and making recommendations for how to fix them. It didn’t surprise me that the people in charge did not listen to the concerns of a relatively obscure Army major. What worried me deeply, however, was the senior leadership’s willingness to obfuscate publicly and deceive Congress regarding the results of FCS testing and computer simulations.
In one particular war game simulation, for example, I played the role of the commander of a combat company equipped with FCS. A computer simulation will calculate results based only on the data programmed into it, of course. Upload the wrong parameters or inaccurate data, and the results will be equally inaccurate. In this case, without even knowing how the software had been written, I could tell immediately that it bore no resemblance to what would happen in actual combat. The simulation assumed, for instance, that every phone line, every satellite communications device, and every radio unit would be working perfectly throughout the battle, making no allowance either for interference from terrain and atmospheric conditions or for damage from enemy action. At the same time, further stacking the odds unrealistically in our favor, the enemy was scripted to be docile and unimaginative—something completely contrary to what I observed from enemy forces during my four combat deployments.
I wrote a detailed memorandum for my direct supervisor, a full colonel—and himself a combat vet—that laid out how inaccurate the simulation had been. It wasn’t merely an academic question. I feared the results of this simulation would be presented as evidence that the new weapons systems worked as designed, and Congress would then be asked to fund and implement the program based on this alleged success.
As it turned out, my fears were fully realized. I was sitting in the back row of the briefing room when the civilian contracting company running the simulation presented the results of the war game to the FCS director (then a one-star general), claiming it had proved that the weapons would work in real combat. The general congratulated everyone on their fine work and then dutifully conveyed to higher headquarters that the simulation had proved FCS to be effective.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. Shortly after the computer simulation, I saw the results of a field test of new equipment. It was a complete flop: almost nothing worked as expected. Upcoming in six months was a major milestone test that was critical to getting the next round of funding for FCS. By law, the results of that milestone test—good or bad—had to be reported to Congress.
FCS leaders realized that six months would not be nearly enough time to correct the equipment flaws. So they brazenly pretended that instead of failing to meet deadlines, the program was doing better than expected. The testing schedule had to be revised, senior leaders told Congress, because the technology was advancing more rapidly than anticipated and they were “accelerating” the program.
None of that was true, but they knew that Congress wasn’t going to ask detailed questions or look carefully at the data. The falsified reports succeeded in deceiving the lawmakers. Only in mid-2009, after six years and $20 billion had been squandered, did the secretary of defense finally cancel the program. No general was ever held to account for the failure.
IT WOULDN’T BE long, unfortunately, before I would again see this seedy side of the Army’s senior leadership.
In September 2009, famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward published a blockbuster article on Afghanistan. It featured a leaked report by the recently appointed commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, which concluded that the war was in grave danger of “mission failure.” Success was “still achievable,” McChrystal argued—but only if he got forty thousand more troops, on top of the sixty-eight thousand already authorized for Afghanistan.
Having already spent one combat tour in and around Afghanistan, I was very skeptical that adding yet more troops would accomplish what the previous decade of fighting had not. In an unclassified report I wrote while assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency, I argued that the fundamentals at play in Afghanistan—standard principles of war, geography, culture, and history—were not in our favor. I listed a number of likely outcomes if President Obama chose to listen to McChrystal. Sending in forty thousand more troops, I said, would probably exacerbate the anti-American feelings among the local population, while still not allowing us to completely eradicate the Taliban. It would produce inadequately trained Afghan National Security Forces while doing little to improve the weak and corrupt Afghan government. And it would put a major strain on our armed forces, which would suffer considerable casualties and be distracted from training their core warfighting skills.
Nearly all these predictions would turn out to be right. It bears noting that I am neither a visionary nor a prophet: the realities on the ground, the nature of the enemy, and the shortfalls of the proposed strategy should have made it obvious to anyone that McChrystal’s proposal was deeply flawed. Nevertheless, in December 2009, the president largely acquiesced to McChrystal’s request and ordered thirty thousand more US troops into Afghanistan (with NATO members contributing a further seven thousand).
A mere six months later, General David H. Petraeus, then commander of US Central Command, testified before Congress that US forces were moving “toward accomplishment of our important objectives in Afghanistan and we are seeing early progress as we get the inputs right in that country.” I admit I was surprised that things were turning around so fast, but this was one case where I would have been delighted to be proved wrong. I was all for anything that would end the war faster, eliminate the need for US troops to be killed, and allow the Afghan people to finally live again in peace.
Around the same time, I received orders to deploy to Afghanistan as a member of the Rapid Equipping Force, a new organization created to streamline the acquisition process for deployed units. As part of the job, I traveled more than nine thousand miles during my yearlong deployment and met with well over two hundred soldiers of every rank, from privates to division commanders. To see their needs firsthand, I accompanied troops on foot patrols and vehicle patrols, attended their meetings with Afghan village leaders and military commanders, and even took part in a few special operations missions.
There probably wasn’t anyone in Afghanistan at the time who witnessed as much of the fighting, at every level and region, as I did. As a result, I got to see in great detail just how dysfunctional America’s war really was—and how dishonest some of our military leaders had become. The progress Petraeus and others had claimed was nonexistent.
It wasn’t long before my aggravation started turning to anger. In March 2011, I read about a fairly large battle that had taken place in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border and not far from where I had patrolled the previous month. It was known as Operation Strong Eagle III. Public reports indicated it was one of the more intense battles in recent Afghan history, with the US side suffering an uncharacteristically high casualty count: six dead and fifteen or more wounded.
The division commander, Major General John F. Campbell, told reporters that there had been large Taliban weapon caches near the site of the battle. Campbell said he “knew this area had a number of insurgents in there,” and “that’s why we were targeting this area.” The 101st Airborne troops were saddened by the loss of their fellow troopers, Campbell said, but “they fight valiantly … they want to make sure their battle buddy didn’t die in vain.”
Anyone who has seen American combat troops in action would not doubt the general’s depiction of the troopers as fighting valiantly. The more research I did, however, the more I realized that contrary to Campbell’s words, those lives had indeed been thrown away in vain.
A mere nine months before Operation Strong Eagle III, I discovered, another unit from the 101st Airborne had fought against the Taliban in almost exactly the same location, with two American soldiers killed during the battle. In that earlier engagement, the Afghan army and police ran away almost as soon as the shooting started, leaving the fight to the United States alone. We defeated the Taliban fighters, built the Afghan security forces an armored command post, and set them up to successfully hold the terrain after our departure. And yet, within weeks after we’d left, the Afghan forces abandoned the defensive positions we’d purchased with the lives of two Americans—because of rumors that the Taliban might return.
By the time of Operation Strong Eagle III, in other words, we knew that Afghan troops wouldn’t hold the area after we attacked. So why in God’s name did we go back in, throwing the lives of six more American soldiers into the dirt less than three weeks before their battalion was set to begin flying home? And as for the claims that the new mission was a serious setback for the Taliban, that our troops had found “several large, large caches,” those were hogwash: we had actually found surprisingly little.
I was so furious I began contemplating a course of action that would dwarf anything I had ever done before: publicly taking on Petraeus and other generals to stand up for the truth. It wasn’t just that they were deceiving Congress and the American people—though they certainly were—but that men were dead, and more would die, to enable the perpetuation of these lies.
As months passed and my visits to forward areas piled up, I saw nothing to change my mind. Every troop unit I visited in the field reinforced the same truth: the war on the ground was going badly, we were not winning, the Afghan troops were minimally effective. And all along, senior US leaders continued selling the fiction of a war “on the right path.”
If I still had any doubts about going public with my observations, they were destroyed in August 2011. I was at the forward headquarters of an infantry company in Kandahar Province, southern Afghanistan. The company commander said that despite what higher headquarters might have told me, the tactical situation for his men was dire. They had lost many lives and limbs to IED blasts, all their efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of the local population had uniformly failed, and the Afghan military was of little help. “This is becoming an all too familiar entry,” I wrote in my journal, “but I am seething at the absurdity and unconcern for the lives of my fellow soldiers displayed by so many” of the senior Army leaders in Afghanistan.
I asked the company’s first sergeant—the highest-ranking enlisted soldier—about his men’s morale. He had been on the job for only a month, he told me; his predecessor was killed after stepping on a buried IED. (Another member of the company said that the previous first sergeant had been blown “into five pieces” by the blast.) In answer to my question, he said his men were basically “resigned to their fate. Guys are saying, ‘I hope I can at least have some R & R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they’ll even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’”
Though they had killed many Taliban fighters, the company commander told me, the situation was perpetually the same: the insurgents were immediately replaced, often with fighters better than the ones they’d killed. The Afghan military remained minimally capable, and the villagers still didn’t trust the United States. “How do I look my men in the eye,” the commander rhetorically asked me, “and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder, how do I look my first sergeant’s wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”
To these questions I had to add one of my own: How could I go back to the United States and keep my mouth shut, doing nothing to counter the egregious lies that were getting so many Americans like these killed and dismembered?
BY THE TIME my deployment ended in October 2011, my spirit was deeply grieved and in turmoil. Many good friends were already telling me that while they sympathized with what I had observed, it would be career suicide to go public. “Why should you throw everything away and put your personal life in such trouble,” one friend asked, “when you know it’s not going to make any difference?”
The thing is, I knew he was almost certainly right. In all probability, I would bring considerable grief on my own head if I told the truth in public. There was active opposition to soldiers who bucked the system. And I wasn’t so naïve as to believe that President Obama was going to change his war policy just because a single Army lieutenant colonel said things weren’t going as advertised.
Ultimately, though, my conscience would not permit me to remain silent. I don’t even think that I displayed any profound courage in what I did. I went public with the truth of the Afghan War because I had to; because the spirit within me would not allow me to do otherwise. Regardless of whether my words would help end the war, I felt morally obligated to report what I had seen.
If nothing else, America needed to know what was really happening on the ground in Afghanistan. The soldiers who had died there for no gain to our country were forever silenced: they could never again speak for themselves. Thousands of other troopers who knew the truth only too well also had no voice, because they had no access to publications and no reason to believe anyone would listen. The only messages that America did hear were the perpetually optimistic—and frequently outright false—reports from the senior leaders.
I had simply seen too much. I could no longer sleep at night knowing what I knew and yet not doing anything about it. The question was, how should I go about telling my story? Approach a reporter? Write something of my own? Going public in any form was sure to anger my superiors and get me in no small amount of hot water. What I didn’t want to do was to make a peep that few would ever hear, and still suffer the consequences that would come from publicly rebuking the Pentagon’s senior leaders. I needed to find the most “bang for the buck” so that the risk would have the maximum impact.
I enlisted the aid of three friends who would prove invaluable in helping me make the most of the situation: Matthew Hoh, Gareth Porter, and Tony Shaffer. Each played a crucial role in getting my story widely distributed. Hoh, who had gained national notoriety in 2009 when he resigned from a senior State Department job in Afghanistan in protest over the US strategies, put me in touch with Congressman Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina. Shaffer, who took on the Pentagon when he published his 2010 book about “black ops” in Afghanistan, Operation Dark Heart, connected me with Scott Shane, a reporter from the New York Times. And Porter, author of a critically acclaimed book about the origins of the Vietnam War, Perils of Dominance, helped me refine my storytelling methods.
Congressman Jones eventually connected me to quite a few other members of the House and Senate, whom I met privately before anything was published. That proved enormously useful: more than one senator and representative told me that if I were to suffer retaliation from the Army, they would have my back.
The involvement of the New York Times was perhaps the most crucial: without it, few would ever have heard what I had to say about our military leaders’ deception. The Times is inundated with great story ideas on a daily basis, and I am most fortunate that Shane chose to elevate mine. Shane also coordinated with the Armed Forces Journal to synchronize the publication of his article and the AFJ publishing my personal narrative.
After the New York Times piece ran, CNN and PBS NewsHour briefly covered the story and gave it further national exposure. But within weeks, the news cycle moved on and no one gave a second thought to what I had revealed. I did take quite a bit of heat from my immediate commanders, while the generals in the Pentagon—where I was working as a liaison officer at the time—did little to hide their contempt for me when we were in the same room. But compared with what other whistleblowers have suffered, my treatment was rather tame.
I have never at any point regretted my decision to go public. I knew then that it was the right thing to do, and nothing that has happened over the decade since has made me question it. I must confess, however, to some pretty significant discouragement—because the lies I illuminated in my public statements continued on, relentlessly, throughout the rest of the war. The Taliban kept getting stronger and stronger, while the Afghan government, mired in internal divisions, remained one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. Yet for years, US commanders continued to spread the fiction that we were succeeding—most infamously in late 2013, when General John Allen, outgoing commander of US forces in Afghanistan, said: “This is victory, this is what winning looks like, and we should not shrink from using these words.”
The ignominious end to the Afghan War in August 2021 finally showed the whole world that twenty years of optimistic claims by a parade of generals and presidents had all been fiction. And thanks to the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers, the world got to see that it wasn’t merely a matter of bad advice or “errors in judgment” but often a case of conscious, deliberate falsehoods. I and other whistleblowers knew more than a decade ago that the war would end in defeat, but the lies of our leaders ensured that this end would not come until America suffered thousands more unnecessary casualties.
My heart still mourns for them all.