Major Danny Sjursen

Major Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kansas. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

2018: A Year of Forever War in Review According to the “Adults in the Room”

Call it the deep state, the swamp, or whatever you like, but bottom line: during Trump’s first two years in office, there wasn’t, until now, any serious rethinking of American foreign and military policy, not in terms of peaceableness anyway.

Major Danny Sjursen
By Major Danny Sjursen

Leave it to liberals to pin their hopes on the oddest things. In particular, they seemed to find post-Trump solace in the strange combination of the two-year-old Mueller investigation and the good judgment of certain Trump appointees, the proverbial “adults in the room.” Remember that crew? It once included Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the

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Blowback: A Retired Army Veteran Laments US Middle East Policy

Grievances are gestating, plots unfolding, and new terror outfits gaining recruits due to the very presence of the U.S. military, its air power, and the CIA’s drone force in a “war” that is about to enter its 18th year.

Major Danny Sjursen
By Major Danny Sjursen
Afghanistan Insider Attacks

On September 3rd, a U.S Army sergeant major was killed by two Afghan police officers - the very people his unit, the new Security Force Assistance Brigade, was there to train. It was the second fatal “insider attack,” as such incidents are regularly called, this year and the 102nd since the start of the Afghan War 17 long years ago. Such attacks

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What If We Never Fell for Al-Qaeda’s Trap & Avoided the ‘War on Terror’?

“Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.”
— Thucydides

Major Danny Sjursen
By Major Danny Sjursen
U.S. Marines pay their final respects at a memorial service for 1st Marine Division Combat Photographer Cpl. William Salazar, 26, of Las Vegas, NV, at Camp Blue Diamond, on the outskirts of Ramadi, Iraq, Monday, Oct. 18, 2004. (AP/Jim MacMillan)

You’ve heard the platitude that hindsight is 20/20. It’s true enough and, though I’ve been a regular skeptic about what policymakers used to call the Global War on Terror, it’s always easier to poke holes in the past than to say what you would have done. My conservative father was the first to ask me what exactly I would have suggested on September

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Will Congress Ever Be Brave Enough To End War Authorization?

If more than 70 years of recent history is any indication, Congress simply can’t be counted on when it comes time to stand, be heard, and vote on American wars.

Major Danny Sjursen
By Major Danny Sjursen
Servicemen of the "Fighting Eagles" 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, walk by tanks that arrived via train to the US base in Mihail Kogalniceanu, eastern Romania, Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2017. (AP/Andreea Alexandru)

On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and said, “Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early

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