I met General Hal Moore a few years ago, at a dinner in his honor in Los Angeles, around the time the movie We Were Soldiers was released. Both Joe Galloway and General Moore signed a copy of their book We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young for me. General Moore added a note, citing a quote from my book, Gates of Fire, which he said reminded him of LZ X-Ray and his warriors in that fight. It was the quote about "Any army can win when it still has its legs under it; what counts is what they do when all strength has fled and they must produce victory on will alone." That note means a great deal. Decades earlier, he and the 1st battalion, 7th U.S. Cavalry kept their legs under them during the battle of Ia Drang, and produced victory. And General Moore has continued standing strong since. A special thank you to Joe Galloway for providing the pictures accompanying this post...

Read the entire interview.

More good news from Afghanistan: the U.S. military has no idea where the billions it's spending on warzone contractors is actually ending up. And nine years into the war, the Pentagon has barely started the long, laborious process of figuring it out.

Rear Admiral Kathleen Dussault just arrived in Kabul about a week and a half ago as the commander of Task Force 2010, a new unit established to ensure that the military's dependence on contractors for everything from laundry to armed security doesn't end up undermining Afghanistan's stability in the process. That's no hypothetical concern: a congressional report last week found that Afghan, U.S. and Mideastern trucking companies who have a piece of a $2.16 billion logistics contract with the military pay about $4 million every week in protection money to warlords and Taliban insurgents.

Enter Dussault, one of the military's few flag officers to specialize in contracting and the former commander of the Joint Contracting Command-Iraq/Afghanistan. Her priority for Task Force 2010's joint military/civilian team of auditors and investigators, Dussault tells Danger Room in a phone interview from Afghanistan, "is to put a laser-like focus on the flow of money, and to understand exactly how money is flowing from the contracting authorities to the prime contractor and the subcontractors they work with." It's imperative, she adds, to get contractors to "understand they have to be more specific about who their network is and what their subcontractors are." ...

More at Danger Room and also check out the recent Center for a New American Security report Contracting in Conflicts: The Path to Reform, which calls on the U.S. government to embark on a path of ambitious reform that will increase federal oversight and better protect U.S. taxpayer dollars from potential waste, fraud and abuse. CNAS' Senior Fellow Richard Fontaine (coauthor with John Nagl on the report) will testify tomorrow at a congressional hearing on the role of contractors in warzones.

And last, but not least, visit one the best blogs covering contractors in a warzone - Matt's Feral Jundi.

In a hastily-assembled hearing tomorrow, Gen. David H. Petraeus will appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee as a prelude to his confirmation as the new top commander in Afghanistan. Petraeus -- author of the military's manual on counterinsurgency warfare, who commanded the counterinsurgency in Iraq -- should, and likely will, receive the unanimous support from the committee. But the hearing should nevertheless be a forum for a penetrating analysis of President Obama's policy in pursuing the war.

Announcing Gen. McChrystal's relief and Petraeus's nomination, the president was emphatic in saying that his action was a change in people, not policy. But the nation-building policy begun by President Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan and continued by Obama, is -- by objective criteria -- failing. It deserves to be dissected publicly, and Petraeus is the best person to explain how it could work. Here are some of the questions that committee members should pose...

Read the five questions at Real Clear Politics.

Update: For ease of commenting here are the five questions as extracted from Jed Babbin's fine article.

1. How can the counterinsurgency succeed unless these sources of funding are cut off?

2. What is the competing cause offered by the Afghan Government, and how can it be made more attractive than the Islamic fundamentalism that has existed in Afghanistan for decades or even centuries?

3. What are the major advantages and disadvantages you foresee in Afghanistan and how do they compare with those you faced in Iraq?

4. Can the counterinsurgency succeed without first terminating Iran's lethal assistance to the Taliban?

5. The next major Afghanistan policy review will occur in December. What measures of success or failure do you believe should be applied in December to decide the way forward?

Please see the original article for commentary and insights that accompany the questions.

Defining Success in Afghanistan - Stephen Biddle, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Fotini Christia, assistant professor at MIT, and J Alexander Their, director for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace, urge the Obama administration to pursue decentralized democracy in Afghanistan.

The New Cocaine Cowboys - Robert C. Bonner, senior principal of the Sentinel HS Group, describes the tactics Mexico should use to fight its battle against drug cartels.

"The story of a President, 2 Generals, the future of a war and magazine story. The implications on the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal. We talk to David Kilcullen, former counter insurgency advisor to David Petraeus, Eric Bates, Executive Editor of Rolling Stone, Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University, Rajiv Chandrasekaran from the Washington Post and Michael Gordon of the New York Times. Also via phone from Afghanistan with Dexter Filkins of The New York Times. We close with excerpts from past interviews with General McChrystal and General Petraeus."

A Look at Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Afghanistan - Charlie Rose interview.

... The rise and fall of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal -- whom President Obama dismissed Wednesday as commander of the faltering U.S.-led war in Afghanistan after an explosive magazine article featured the general and his top aides deriding the president, vice president and other civilian leaders as well as foreign allies -- will no doubt play a major role in the stories we ultimately tell ourselves about the Afghan conflict. These war stories are not just morality tales to be retold in high school history books or television documentaries. They can shape the way the United States fights its enemies in the future, and the way it settles disputes over war at home. The McChrystal saga, with its echoes of the Vietnam era's bitter civilian-military recriminations, threatens to do the same.

In Vietnam, as in the Gulf War, the old stories are, to say the least, radically incomplete. The civilians did not, in fact, micromanage most of the Vietnam War. President Lyndon B. Johnson restricted bombing targets in North Vietnam for the sensible reason that he did not want to bring China and Russia into a larger conflict. The campaign in the South -- including massive bombardment and search-and-destroy missions -- was the product of a conventional military that understood the war chiefly in terms of killing the enemy, not fighting an insurgency. Similarly, a truer tale of the Gulf War would emphasize the U.S. failure to shatter Saddam Hussein's power, which paved the way for years of blockade and sporadic bombardment, leading to a second and conclusive showdown more than a decade later...

More at The Washington Post.

For the military, it's like a grisly death in the family: How did Gen. Stanley McChrystal, one of the most respected soldiers of his generation, blow himself up in a magazine profile? It's a puzzle to McChrystal's colleagues here, and understandably, there's a new wariness in dealing with the media.

The relationship between the military and the press could probably use a little adjustment. The Rolling Stone article was a wake-up call for both sides that the coziness that has evolved over the past decade, as "embedding" of reporters became more widespread, can cause problems. Now there's likely to be a tilt back toward more traditional ground rules and a little more distance. We'll see whether that leads to better reporting or just a chillier relationship...

More at The Washington Post.

Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics. Events of the past week - notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's dismissal - hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military's professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms.

Earlier generations of American leaders, military as well as civilian, instinctively understood the danger posed by long wars. "A democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War," Gen. George C. Marshall once remarked. The people who provided the lifeblood of the citizen army raised to wage World War II had plenty of determination but limited patience. They wanted victory won and normalcy restored.

The wisdom of Marshall's axiom soon became clear. In Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson plunged the United States into what became its Seven Years War. The citizen army that was sent to Southeast Asia fought valiantly for a time and then fell to pieces. As the conflict dragged on, Americans in large numbers turned against the war -- and also against the troops who fought it...

More at The Washington Post.

Since 2001, a dozen commanders have cycled through the top jobs in Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. Central Command, which oversees both wars. Three of those commanders - including the recently dismissed Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal - have been fired or resigned under pressure. History has judged many others harshly, and only two, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno, are widely praised as having mastered the complex mixture of skills that running America's wars demands.

For the military, this record of mediocrity raises a vexing question: What is wrong with the system that produces top generals? Much of what top commanders do in such places as Afghanistan and Iraq bears little relation to the military skills that helped them rise through the ranks, military officials said. Today's wars demand that top commanders act like modern viceroys, overseeing military operations and major economic development efforts. They play dominant roles in the internal politics of the countries where their troops fight...

More at The Washington Post.

The drive by President Hamid Karzai to strike a deal with Taliban leaders and their Pakistani backers is causing deep unease in Afghanistan's minority communities, who fought the Taliban the longest and suffered the most during their rule. The leaders of the country's Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities, which make up close to half of Afghanistan's population, are vowing to resist - and if necessary, fight - any deal that involves bringing members of the Taliban insurgency into a power-sharing arrangement with the government.

Alienated by discussions between President Karzai and the Pakistani military and intelligence officials, minority leaders are taking their first steps toward organizing against what they fear is Mr. Karzai's long-held desire to restore the dominance of ethnic Pashtuns, who ruled the country for generations. The dispute is breaking along lines nearly identical to those that formed during the final years of the Afghan civil war, which began after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1989 and ended only with the American invasion following the Sept. 11 attacks. More than 100,000 Afghans died, mostly civilians; the Taliban, during their five-year reign in the capital, Kabul, carried out several large-scale massacres of Hazara civilians...

More at The New York Times.