Daniel L. Davis, Eleventh Hour in 2020 America: How America's foreign policy got jacked up and how the next Administration can fix it (2020) — a book review

09 May 2021

Virtually no attention received

Former US Army lieutenant colonel Daniel L. Davis apparently had to self-publish his book — Eleventh Hour in 2020 America: How America's foreign policy got jacked up - and how the next Administration can fix it (2020) — because (we can infer) the Oligarchy would not touch it.

As of this writing, the book has received only 11 reviews at Amazon and zero such at Goodreads.

That's depressing, given that Davis was awarded 2012's Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling.

Worse, if you go to Wikpedia's entry for the prize, Davis is listed as having received it — yet Wikipedia is (apparently) too pro-Military Industrial Complex to have bothered to create a biographical entry for him — despite the fact that this one man managed to piss off the whole caboodle of liars that mainly comprise the top end of America's chain of military command.

If that accomplishment doesn't fulfill Wikipedia's own requirement for societal notability, I don't know what would.

Considering Davis's insider knowledge-based, war-skeptical analysis — and how well his perspective is presented — the totality of our culture's lack of interest should be societally appalling.

What Davis says

He begins the book this way:

American foreign policy is jacked up.

Since Sept. 11, 2011, it has developed to the point that the face of U.S. diplomacy to the world is a series of forever-wars in which no co combat deployments ever end; coercive measures against even major nuclear powers range from muscular military demonstrations to routine use of economic sanctions, even against major allies. The purported intent of these actions is to keep our country safe and to improve our economy.

Instead, we spend exorbitant amounts in blood and treasure to produce almost the opposite.

These actions not only fail their intended purposes, but they deteriorate our security and worsen our international relations. Perhaps even worse, our policies have had a disastrous effect on American servicemen and women: thousands of them have been killed, tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands [have] suffered traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. More than $6 trillion of our tax dollars have been utterly wasted.

[W]e are paying a shockingly high price to manufacture a perpetually failing foreign policy.

What sets Eleventh Hour apart from most other policy critiques

Davis has a breadth of experience with the formative parts of Army strategy that other, more narrowly combat-engaging and remembering authors do not have.

Certainly, Lieutenant Davis had pertinent combat experience at the tank-led (armor and artillery) tip of the Gulf War's fiercest battle. After that introduction to warring mayhem, Davis' Army career took him up through assignments that allowed him to witness, first-hand, how US military strategy, weaponization and their implementations were created and carried out. His recounting constitutes much of the book.

Interspersed among those anecdotes are Davis's reflections regarding how most of the strategic and weaponization steps were mistaken in both focus and execution. In other words, there was a whole lot of wishful thinking and lying going on.

For instance, of the Future Combat Systems' eventual collapse, Davis wrote that:

With every test failure, the command's senior leaders made more excuses to congressional leaders and government watchdogs, explaining away shortcomings, covering up other failures, and outright claiming some aspects of the program succeeded when they had failed.

Senior FCS [Future Combat Systems] leaders had succeeded in silencing me, but they could not hide the program failures forever.

The results of our senior leaders' willingness to prevent Congress from knowing the truth about FCS eventually cost the U.S. close to a decade of lost development opportunity and nearly $20 billion . . .

On April 6, 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates canceled the heart of the program . . . . Gates justified the cancelation by citing many of the very shortcoming I had identified in my FCS articles and analysis papers.

Meanwhile, the Russians needed only six years to design, t4est, and start producing technologically advanced combat vehicles, highlighted by the Armat T-14 tank and T-15 personnel carrier.

Davis' military assignments and the people he had access to — including Vice President Biden's National Security Advisor, Tony Blinken — and White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney — left him with a uniquely deep and broad perspective as to how (and why) the United States has gone astray, morally and strategically.

Take Afghanistan.

Davis deployed there in November 2010, as part of the Rapid Equipping Force:

My job as REF Chief was to visit as many U.S. combat units in as many provinces as I could to find out what equipment they might need to successfully carry out their mission.

While it was important on these site visits that I spent time with the regional commanders (two-star generals) and brigade commanders (full colonels), I always relished visiting the troopers at the company and platoon levels where the muddy boots on the ground did the hard work — and where truth couldn't be spun.

What Davis discovered was that — here in representative extracts:

The Polish lieutenant laughed . . . and answered the question I was thinking: "Yes, we do nothing to limit the Taliban in this area. It takes us maybe 30 minutes to walk through this village, and then we're gone, not to return for maybe two months. It's little more than a nuisance to them." (page 69)

[Later on, regarding the Afghan Army and Police:]

[T]he purpose and intent of those policemen were not to protect the people living in the village adjacent to the outpost, but to protect themselves.

[T]he American patrol leader told me that the U.S. only patrolled the area on occasion, and in any case, he said, "we only control about 100 meters on either side of this road — actually, make that influence 100 meters either side of the road — and the Taliban is totally free to do whatever they want everywhere else." (page 72)

The more I traveled, the more I came to realize the rosy picture being painted b ack home was not merely inaccurate, but was closer to sheer fantasy. (page 75)

In June 2011, I went to Kandahar Province for the first time, visiting units from a brigade of the 10th Mountain Division.

Upon arrival at the objective, the American troops did exactly what they were supposed to do: [116 degree] heat or no heat, they immediately went to work clearing the area of IEDs, building machine gun positions, and preparing defensive works throughout the complex.

The ANA [Afghan National Army] troops, however . . . quite literally went directly to the shade in one of the bombed-out rooms and immediately took naps; they made no effort to complete a single task.

The whole time I was there [in Kandahar] . . . while our troops struggled and sacrificed for the benefit of the Afghan people, their troops seemed unconcerned and demonstrated little interest in learning how to become an effective, professional fighting force. (pages 76-78)

Lt. Colonel Davis was so upset by what he was finding, that — by going through Obama's press secretary (Jay Carney) — he attempted to alert the Obama Administration to the misleading perspectives that Army command was presenting him:

[W]eighing more heavily on my mind than my own brushes with death were the more than 400 Americans who had been killed and more than 5,000 who had been wounded since my arrival in Afghanistan. Absolutely oppressive to my spirit were the ones yet to die if we just blindly continued this mission without change. (page 90)

[I]n every single location I visited in 2010-2011 . . . our military presence in Afghanistan was a charade; it had no genuine military purpose and could never, regardless of how many years we stayed, how may troops we deployed, or how hard we tried, produce a military victory.

[T]actically defeating the superior U.S. military was never [the Taliban's] objective. Instead, they would conduct harassing operations, plant thousands of IEDs along the many roads, and conduct assassination operations against key Afghan leaders — all to make continuing the war so costly and loathsome to us, that eventually we would tire and leave the field of battle. (page 93)

As soon as one [Taliban] leader was killed, one or two took his place almost immediately — and that had been the case since the insurgency started to emerge in 2003. (page 94)

I was convinced in my spirit and soul that knowing the war was being lost, knowing that men would continue to die pointless combat deaths, knowing our leaders were lying to the American public, and yet remaining silent because it would cost me personally would be moral cowardice. (page 94)

Naturally, Davis's warning did no good. Battling with 4 star truth-mashers, all of whom presumably have virtually direct access to the president, is an impossible task.

Having failed in his policy-correction efforts inside the chain of command — and having warned the highest levels of command beforehand (with regard to his coming public presentation) — Davis's findings finally appeared in the New York Times.

Davis' career survived these exposing efforts only because he had support from three influential members of Congress. Nevertheless, the Army made his professional life miserable. See pages 95-102 for that episode.

The remainder of The Eleventh Hour presents Davis' analysis of what the United States got wrong after 9/11 and what we can do to fix it now.

Davis's book is immensely worth buying and reading. Especially so for people, who are unfamiliar with the strategic realities that the Military Industrial Complex continually conceals beneath its propaganda web.

Eleventh Hour reinforces my long-ago warning not to trust American leaders' faked gravitas.

The moral? — Buy Daniel L. Davis's book

Eleventh Hour in 2020 America: How America's foreign policy got jacked up - and how the next Administration can fix it should be read with Andrei Martyanov's equally outstanding — Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse (Clarity Press, 2021).

I reviewed the Martyanov volume here.

PeteFree.com

Daniel L. Davis, Eleventh Hour in 2020 America: How America's foreign policy got jacked up and how the next Administration can fix it (2020) — a book review