meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Conversations with Bill Kristol

Frederick W. Kagan on the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at home

Conversations with Bill Kristol

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.71.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2015

⏱️ 94 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, Fred Kagan is a foreign policy strategist and military historian. In this conversation, Kagan and Kristol discuss the strategy for the troop surge in Iraq in 2006/07, which Kagan helped devise. The two also consider the state of the U.S. military today, including how it operates in wartime, how it educates its cadets, and how it interacts with civilians.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.

0:15.0

Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.

0:17.0

Welcome to Conversations.

0:18.0

I'm joined today by my friend Fred Kagan,

0:20.0

a fellow scholar here at the American Enterprise Institute and director of the Critical Threats Project at A.

0:27.0

You're probably best known if you ask someone on the street in Washington, Fred Kagan,

0:31.0

architect of the Iraq Serg. So that was 2006. Things have gone very very badly.

0:35.2

We were all supporters of the Iraq war in 2003. Things have really started to go badly and by

0:40.2

mid 2006 it was pretty disastrous looking.

0:44.2

And you convened a group, why don't you tell the story?

0:47.4

So, you know, what happened is that Danny Plutka,

0:51.5

my boss, our vice president here, came to me and said,

0:53.6

hey, you know, why don't you, maybe we should do a war game about Iraq and this is probably

0:59.0

in about September of 2006 and you know maybe we can try to raise the level of the discourse in some way.

1:05.0

And there already been criticism that we didn't have enough troops there.

1:08.0

I think we had all written those pieces.

1:10.0

Many times you published many of mine for which I'm grateful.

1:12.0

And worrying that President Bush wasn't adjusting,

1:16.0

and Secretary Rebusfeld in particular worked adjusting strategy

1:18.8

to the conditions on the ground.

1:20.4

So we're in September of six.

1:21.8

And it's getting worse and so there was a feeling that I think we all had that

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Conversations with Bill Kristol, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Conversations with Bill Kristol and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.