| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018267)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
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| --- |
| |
| Chapter Three: |
| War, Peace, Networks |
| In which The Seventh Sense reaches towards the questions of war and peace and |
| power that will flavor our lives, like it or not. |
| One afternoon in the fall of 2009 I received an unexpected call from the Pentagon. |
| The US was, then, nearly a decade into the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq. Each, in its |
| own way, possessed a strange and shifting character, the sort of dim premonition of |
| a greater violence that has always most unnerved warriors and politicians. The old |
| soldier's saying - Fear chaos as much as the enemy - seemed to animate, constantly, |
| the progress of these two fights. Once, before I gave a speech to an audience of |
| newly promoted one-star generals in 2010, a four-star general pulled me aside for a |
| moment. He explained that I'd be speaking to a crowd of officers who had come of |
| age pacing the murderous streets of these wars, watching soldiers under their |
| command killed by an often invisible enemy. "You have to remember that these men |
| have been seared, seared, by a decade of combat," he said. The best American |
| military minds had tried, with characteristically direct and relentless energy, to box |
| the wildness of these wars. In books and papers and thousands of patrols, through |
| millions of hours of language training, and endless risky nights, they had tried. It |
| never quite seemed to work. There would never be a durable sense of mastery. The |
| wars, which appeared a certain and unfairly tilted fight to American victory at the |
| beginning, had run longer than any in the nation's history. They were engines of |
| chaos and fear. |
| The American Marine Corps General Victor Krulak once observed, "The war you |
| prepare for is rarely the war you get," and you could find this phrase whistling |
| through the years of American combat after 9/1135. One of the lessons of both Iraq |
| and Afghanistan - and of the post-World Trade Center wars generally - was that the |
| Pentagon and the fighting services had been unready for what they faced. Soldiers |
| had arrived in Baghdad with forest-colored uniforms, thin-skinned transport, tank- |
| led battle plans - all wrong and mostly dangerous. The most feared weapons system |
| of the era told you something of the tone of the new millennium's wars: $50 to $100 |
| Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Hidden smashups of dynamite, duct tape, |
| cellphone detonators and as much stubbly, impaling iron as could be found. They |
| were impossible to deter. Rapidly deadly. The IED threat, one officer later reflected, |
| "is a contemporary example of conventional militaries being confronted with a |
| tactical surprise with operational-if not strategic—implications." 36 Like so much in |
| 35 The American Marine Corps General: Victor Krulak, "A New Kind of War", in |
| First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps (Bluejacket Press, 1984) 179 |
| 36 The IED threat: Andrew Smith, "Improvised Explosive Devices in Iraq, 2003-09: |
| A Case of Operational Surprise and Institutional Response" Letort Papers (Carlisle, |
| PA: Army War College April, 2011) 9 |
| 35 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018267 |
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|
