On Sept. 11, 2001, Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart was one of the chief war planners at the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida. Working under Gen. Tommy Franks, Renuart helped design the plan that toppled the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in a matter of weeks. As an Air Force pilot, he flew F-16s and A-10s in more than 60 combat missions and capped his 39-year career as the four-star commander of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command. He was described by Bob Woodward in his 2005 book Plan of Attack as a “balding, brainy fighter pilot with a master’s degree in psychology.” The Washington Examiner’s Jamie McIntyre spoke with Renuart as the United States departed Afghanistan and America marked the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Washington Examiner: Books have been written and more books will be written about the two decades of American military campaign in Afghanistan. As someone who was there from the start, how do you feel about the way it ended?
Gene Renuart: Well, I’m sad, and I’m frustrated, a bit disheartened. Betrayed might be too strong a word, but certainly, we haven’t done a service to the many, many, many men and women who put not just their combat skills into Afghanistan but really all of the strength of both the State Department, the military, and others who really worked hard to try to continue to evolve Afghanistan into a functioning nation. I would say that to all the young men and women who have been involved in Afghanistan since 9/11, their courage and their patriotism and their commitment is something we all should be proud of. I think we all feel that the way in which these last couple of weeks have unfolded has been really unfortunate, and I think it doesn’t do a service to their service, but they should all understand, I think, certainly, the military is extremely proud of their service, and I think our nation is as well.
Washington Examiner: The initial weeks and months of the war were a spectacular success. The Taliban were toppled in short order. What went wrong?
Renuart: You’re correct to say our special forces and the Northern Alliance forces supported by the U.S. and our friends, Australians, Canadians, British, and others really enabled a very quick turnover of governance. But as always is the case, as you complete the most immediate combat operations, you have a substantial role in the follow-on, which is: How do you begin to introduce governance and the like back into the country? After the Russians left and the Taliban had been the government for so long, the country really had very little 20th-century culture or infrastructure, and so, what we really found is we had a country that was very tribal in nature and not terribly far out of the Middle Ages in terms of its economic and educational system. It became really much more complicated than I think truly any of us understood. Certainly, from the military perspective, we did not have the depth of knowledge and understanding of how much really needed to be done in Afghanistan once the Taliban fell.
Washington Examiner: I don’t think anybody can deny that a lot of good was accomplished by the U.S. military over the past 20 years, not the least of which is preventing any attack on the U.S. homeland from Afghanistan, but it seemed nation-building was a bridge too far.
Renuart: That was not a traditional role for the U.S. military but certainly one which the other elements of our government weren’t equipped to do. You might recall we had something called provisional reconstruction teams that were led by generally a military lieutenant colonel that led a team of some State Department, a number of reservists that had rule-of-law background, that had education background, that had agriculture background that could really begin to introduce the concepts of governance and rule of law and education in each of the provinces around the country. We began educating not just young people, young women and young boys, to give them a chance at becoming the leader of their country someday, and, of course, those young people that began there might only be 19, 20, 21, 22 years old now after this 20-year period, and they’re not ready to take the leadership role. So, there’s still so much more that needed to be done, and I feel like we’ve just sort of stepped away from that.
Washington Examiner: Looking ahead, what do you think are the lessons of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan, and how should it inform U.S. foreign and national security policy going forward?
Renuart: I think one of the lessons we continue to not learn very well is that we have to have a strategic plan that looks 20 years into the future. I use the example of Germany and Japan and South Korea. Not so much to say that they were the same countries as Afghanistan but rather to say that the U.S. invested as much of its treasure in noncombat power in those nations after the conflict ended to help them really grow and become very well-developed members of the global community after those great wars ended.
Washington Examiner: The U.S. still has thousands of troops in all three of those countries, but they are not in combat.
Renuart: It’s not necessarily military presence but the elements of U.S. power in a region we stabilize. We provide some assurance that terrorism will not begin to grow back into countries like Afghanistan. We don’t want to create a void that someone else will fill who doesn’t share our core values. So, if you don’t stay committed in that regard, you run a very strong risk of having to go back at some point down the road and again, pay a dear price, a national treasure to reestablish that.
Washington Examiner: Americans seem to like neat, clean wars that don’t drag on for years.
Renuart: I think the mindset that says we should be able to do things quickly, light, lean, lethal, with minimal U.S. presence and get in and get out doesn’t understand that the void or the vacuum that you create in a nation like this once the military has completed its most immediate operation. It takes away the ability of the U.S. to maintain not only friendships but also create influence in the strategic interests of our country. We see it over and over again. Countries like China are more than happy to invest in what I call “invested influence.” We have to make a calculation: Is that the world we want to see unfold? Or do we want to continue to see the influence of the United States and all of our partners and friends in some of these nations?
Washington Examiner: As a career military officer who retired as a four-star commander, what do you think are the biggest misconceptions the general public has about how and when America goes to war?
Renuart: I think that the United States really is a global leader for good, and with that comes responsibility. A misconception that many have is that you can do that from afar and that you only need to do that when you see an existential threat to the U.S. What we sometimes fail to recognize is that in so many ways that are nonmilitary, we can create a significant opportunity for other countries in the world. And we’re really the only nation that has that ability — maybe the only nation. Everyone else looks at us to see how we’re going to react. Our friends want to have confidence that if we make a commitment that we’ll be there for the long run. Our adversaries are also watching to see what we do because they then calculate how they will respond. I worry a little bit that one of the lessons that is being learned by many of our friends with the recent events of the last few weeks is that the U.S. may not be able to be trusted.
Washington Examiner: These days at the Pentagon, all the talk is about the changing character of war, that future wars will be fought, or deterred, by more robot systems, ships, planes, underwater drones, hypersonic missiles, swarming drones, all coordinated by artificial intelligence. How is the concept of war-fighting changing?
Renuart: There is no doubt that we will rely more and more heavily on systems that can be operated from afar. We’re going to have systems that are in many cases manned, in many cases informed by very high-quality artificial intelligence tools. We’re going to have systems that can affect an adversary in space and cyber, and so, that will be a very significant part of warfare in the future. But again, you have to understand also that if the objective is to destroy a target and that’s the end state, then those systems work very well. If the objective is to change government by overthrowing a government that is oppressing its people and committing atrocities, then you have to have something that follows along behind that combat operation that instills confidence in the people of the country that they have a future.
Washington Examiner: So, again, it’s what comes after the initial military victory?
Renuart: That’s harder to do with artificial intelligence and all of the highly technical capabilities that we’re seeing develop. You have to do that in a way face to face, and I think that we are going to have to change the nature of what constitutes a U.S. presence post-combat, and I think that isn’t necessarily a big footprint of the military. We have to rethink the way we fund and require other agencies of government to be a part of that process. I’ve been very strong in favor of doubling, for example, the State Department’s budget because we gutted things like USAID and other organizations in the ’90s. When we began operations in Afghanistan, we had about a tenth of the USAID experts that we had five or 10 years before that.
Washington Examiner: Aside from how the U.S. would fight a future war, isn’t the bigger question like when to go to war? We have a generation of young Americans now who’ve never known a time when the nation was not at war.
Renuart: I think that’s a fair observation, and I think we have to clearly define what our strategic interests are. But I will hasten to say also that we tend to be reactionary in some of these cases. Think about Afghanistan as an example. We reacted to the events of 9/11, and so you had a very strong, emotional push from not only our government but certainly from our country that we had to respond to that attack, and we had to hold those responsible for it and for those who allowed that terrorist organization to grow accountable. It wasn’t a conflict of our choosing. I think if you’re in that environment, you’ve got to very clearly define what your outcome should be.
Washington Examiner: Speaking of a conflict that may not be of our choosing, every day it seems we report another story about the possibility that China might invade Taiwan sometime in the next five to 10 years to achieve its goal of forcing the democratically governed island to join the communist mainland. How worried should we be about that, and perhaps more importantly, how does the U.S. prevent it?
Renuart: I think we have to be very clear and strong in our commitment to Taiwan to live up to the treaty and security agreements that we’ve signed with them. There’s probably some contingent that says, “Well, maybe we don’t have to do that anymore.” I think that would be a betrayal of a friend. We have to be very clear in our, if you will, declaratory policy that we will support Taiwan if China were to conduct some operation against it. We have to engage China to a degree to remind them that there are many other ways to maintain a partnership with the rest of the world than to assert an aggressive takeover of a country like Taiwan. I think that same message, by the way, needs to go to Russia with respect to the Ukraine.
Washington Examiner: The United States still has the best-trained, best-equipped military that’s ever existed on the planet. Are we safe?
Renuart: I think today, I would say we are safe. We’re seeing other nations, primarily China but Russia to some degree, accelerating their race to either become an equal or even potentially hold us at risk. We have to continue to match or exceed them. Five or 10 years ago, we might’ve said China is really not as good as we are, but what we’re seeing very quickly is they are catching up, and in a couple of areas, they’re beginning to exceed us. For example, they’ve conducted 30 or 35 tests of hypersonic weapons over the last five years, and we’ve conducted three or four or five. We can’t rest on our laurels and say they won’t get as good as we are because they will. They’re not constrained by the challenges of budget. They’re not constrained by competing political parties in their country. The Chinese have written their strategies 50 years into the future, and they update it routinely. Ours tends to be more tied to our budget cycle, and that’s unfortunate. We owe it to service members to not think about these problems the way we have over the last 15, 20, 25 years. We’ve got to be much more strategic in our approach, and that’s a whole-of-government strategy. It’s not just a national defense strategy. We’ve got to change that paradigm of planning.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
