WarTalk: GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the Pech Valley represents the war in miniature: outposts meant to shield Afghan villages that instead drew the fighting to their doorsteps, built for reasons nobody manning them could explain. Wesley Morgan spent a decade finding out why.

Wesley Morgan is the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley, winner of the 2022 Colby Award. He first embedded in the Pech as a college student in 2010 and later covered the Pentagon for Politico.

We discuss…

• How a timber dispute became the Korengal — one Green Beret team refused the bait, the next took it, and Big Taliban followed
• The three tribes of the war in the east — conventional forces, Green Berets, and the JSOC task force, each fighting its own war in the same valleys
• Ten thousand beanie babies and record artillery expenditure — how measures of performance swallowed measures of effectiveness
• Black Hawk Down, Ghost Recon, and the making of multicam — how Crye sold the camouflage of the elite through video games because it couldn't advertise its Delta contract
• The death of the embed — Rumsfeld overruling Colin Powell, the 2013 shutdown, and why influencers in the briefing r4om beat reporters in the field
• Whether the Army learned anything at all — disbanding the Asymmetric Warfare Group, rebuilding short-range air defense from zero, and Ukraine as the excuse to never say "Afghanistan" again

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