Lieutenant General Mike Fenzel (Ret.)

“I think, Auren, the one thing that was very upsetting to me after being there for a few months and even more upsetting to me now is this conflation of the Palestinian cause with the Hamas cause. This is something that I find disturbing. I'm always pushing back against it. My experience is that Palestinians, in general, 99% of them, they just want peace. They just want to live with security and stability and raise their families.”

“The other thing is the insidious nature of extremist settler violence on the Israeli side. This is again a very small population of extremists among Israelis, a hilltop use, they're called in some cases, but they're not just a handful of bad apples there. They make up, let's say, 1% as well of the settler population of about 700,000, and 7,000 bad apples. Extremist settler violence also threatens Israel as much as it does Palestinians, which I found to be incredibly disturbing and something that gave common cause to both sides working together.”

“First of all, it's reputational risk. Once you get involved in a conflagration, an intervention, an invasion, you don't want to end it until you've achieved success. Success begins to morph to something different than what you saw in the beginning. Whenever you're considering military intervention as a nation, you've got to think about what the end state is from the beginning. You can't allow the objectives to change as you move along. Otherwise, it will become an endless commitment.”

“Well, it comes back to the one year tours that became part of the fabric of the US military and their deployments, particularly to Afghanistan. One year was the maximum. It actually bumped up to 15 months. I experienced that myself. You had essentially 20 strategies, 21 year tours that were being led. I mean, I'm exaggerating for effect. When you brought in a new commander, they again believed that they had the recipe for success and many times would change the strategy that was put in place by their predecessor.”

“If you go back in time, at least from a layman like me, my perspective is the experts have gotten so many things wrong on US foreign policy over the last 25 years. Do you agree with that? So what is the theory about why? The important thing to remember is how much more complex the world is getting. The media cycle is increasing in speed so dramatically. There is also this desire to please a public, right? Because the election cycle seems to be ongoing.”

“The second thing is our commitment to lessons learned. I know this sounds pedantic or even lower level, but it's not. We have training centers in Fort Polk, Louisiana, in Fort Irwin, California, and in Hohenfels, Germany, all focused on moving our units through there and learning difficult lessons and then applying them and then going again. And our commitment to candor, honesty, and integrating lessons learned is relentless.”

“But there's a quote from TR. He wrote this book that most all military officers read called This Kind of War, Auren. There's a chapter in there, a chapter called Proud Legions. And there's this quote, I'm going to try and remember it. But you may fly over a land forever. You may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it, and scatter it to the winds. But if you desire to defend it, to protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the dirt.”

“I remember, Auren, I joined the Army because, you know, it wasn't because I was inspired, you know, by something post-September 11th. I thought, oh gosh, you know, I could retire at 42 with a pension. That seems pretty lucrative, right? My dad also said to me, look, why do you want to go into finance now when you could lead 35 individuals right away as a platoon leader? I said, oh, I didn't know you could do that. He's like, yeah, I was a platoon leader.”

“I got the advice from my mother, and I think it's the best advice I've ever received. And I don't think that there's enough emphasis. What was the advice you got from your mother? Choose your friends wisely because you become who they are.”