I have spent the week on the road with the Forum’s supporters in Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia, and I am in New York on Wednesday. That explains the pause in the Tuesday-to-Friday editions. The Long View runs today as planned, and tomorrow a special edition previews the UN General Assembly, whose general debate opens on September 22. This Friday is the 25th anniversary of September 11. Today’s essay remembers it through the commanders it produced: six generals from three armies, what their courage teaches the next generation, and what it asks of the citizens they served. It goes to every reader, free and premium alike.
The Weight of Command
Twenty-five years after September 11, six commanders from three armies, the courage each one showed, and the covenant their citizens owe them.
On Friday morning the names will be read again at Ground Zero. The reading begins at 8:30 and pauses at 8:46 for the first of seven silences. Twenty-five years. The 2,977 people murdered that morning sent two armies to war, and the quarter century that followed put a third, Israel’s, through wars of its own on every border. This Long View is about the men who commanded all three.
I have watched those armies from close range. I wore an Israeli uniform, worked inside Israel’s Ministry of Defense, and have lectured to cadets at West Point. From every seat the same thing was true: the man at the top carries a weight the public rarely sees, and the public honors him, when it honors him at all, for the wrong things.
The price is on the record. More than 7,053 American service members died in the wars that followed 9/11, by the Costs of War project’s figure. Britain lost 457 in Afghanistan and 179 in Iraq. Israel’s fallen since October 7, 2023 stand at 968 soldiers killed in combat by the army’s own figures, and at 1,152 security personnel by the Defense Ministry’s wider measure at the war’s second anniversary.
Six commanders carried those numbers, two from each army, chosen for courage, which in a general takes more forms than a citizen usually credits. Physical: the colonel who keeps firing after the third bullet. Intellectual: the general who admits that the war he is fighting is not the war he planned. Moral: the chief who tells his own government a truth it does not want to hear, knowing what it will cost him. Presence: the division commander who goes into the tunnel first. And the rarest, accountability: the chief who fails, says so, resigns, and spends his retirement at the graves.
None of this is hagiography; where a mistake belongs in the record I have kept it there. The argument is about what their courage teaches the next generation of commanders, and what it asks of the citizens who send them.
On August 19, 2005, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla chased a car through Mosul with three of his soldiers. A marksman in a helicopter disabled it, the men inside fled into a maze of shops and alleys, and they opened fire. Kurilla was hit three times, in both legs and an arm; one bullet snapped his femur. He kept shooting and kept giving orders until his soldiers arrived and took an insurgent prisoner. The action brought a Bronze Star with V device and one of his two Purple Hearts. Michael Yon, the embedded journalist who photographed him going down, recorded a sentence from one of his soldiers that the Seattle Times reprinted: “This is my family. Colonel Kurilla is like my dad. He would die for me.”
He took over Central Command on April 1, 2022, and it was CENTCOM under Kurilla that broke Iran’s two direct attacks on Israel. He landed in Israel on April 11, 2024, two days before Tehran fired more than 100 ballistic missiles, over 150 drones and over 30 cruise missiles. His final posture statement records the outcome of that night and of October 1 in five words, “Both times they were defeated,” and records who did it: “our People who left the safety of their bunkers on 13 April 2024 to fuel, arm, and fly their F-15s into a fusillade of missiles and UAVs.” On June 22, 2025, on the President’s orders, the same command struck Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan Caine, named him from the Pentagon podium: “US Central Command, under the command of General Erik Kurilla, executed Operation Midnight Hammer.”
He relinquished command on August 8, 2025 with a sentence that belongs to the soldiers rather than to him: “It has been the honor of my life to have been their commander.” The lesson of Kurilla is presence. The colonel who bled in a Mosul alley ran a theater as a man who knew what he was asking of the people in it, and the force felt the difference.
Raymond Odierno commanded the 4th Infantry Division into Iraq in 2003, and on December 13 of that year his division’s 1st Brigade, working with a special operations task force, pulled Saddam Hussein out of a hole near Tikrit. The same tour earned him the harshest criticism any American general took in that war. Thomas Ricks wrote in Fiasco that the division used “ham-fisted approaches” that “alienated large parts of the population.” Odierno defended his soldiers and conceded the point in the same breath: “yeah, initially, we probably made some mistakes,” and “we adapted quickly.”
He went back in December 2006 as the corps commander of the surge, the officer who turned Gen. David Petraeus’s ideas into operations. Petraeus wrote afterward: “No theater commander ever had a better ‘operational architect’ than I had in him.” In 2008, conceding that his thinking had evolved, Odierno gave the answer most generals never give: “I’d be wrong if I said I didn’t learn.” That is the courage to fight the war you are in rather than the one you planned, and it is rarer at the top than courage under fire.
He carried the war home. On August 21, 2004, his son, Capt. Tony Odierno, lost his left arm to a rocket-propelled grenade on the Baghdad airport road; the driver beside him was killed. Two years later the father said: “There’s nothing that’s more personal than losing soldiers or soldiers being injured, whether they’re your son or not. Every soldier who’s injured or killed, it’s personal.” The wound, he said later, left him with “an obligation to mothers and fathers.”
At his last Pentagon briefing, in August 2015, he spoke of the soldiers who had died under his orders across more than fifty months in Iraq: “that’s something that I will live with for the rest of my life.” He died of cancer on October 8, 2021, at 67, and was buried at Arlington. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s statement said he and his wife Linda “looked after the families of those troops as if they were their own.” The lesson of Odierno is humility: he relearned his war in the middle of it, and he carried its dead for the rest of his life.
Richard Dannatt won the Military Cross as a 22-year-old lieutenant in Belfast in 1973, in a shooting in which his driver, Private Raymond “Tapper” Hall, took a bullet in the back and died two weeks later. In August 2006 he became Chief of the General Staff with the British Army fighting in Basra and Helmand at once, a strain he later described to the Iraq Inquiry as “the perfect storm.”
Two months into the job he gave the interview that defined him. British troops, he told the Daily Mail, should “get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems.” The next morning he explained on the radio why a serving chief had said it aloud: “I am not a maverick in this sense. I am soldier speaking up for his army... I want an army in five years time and 10 years time. Don’t let’s break it on this one.” Tony Blair, caught off guard, said: “I agree with every word of it.”
He then spent three years on the Military Covenant, the obligation a nation owes the soldiers it sends, which he called “clearly out of kilter.” In July 2008 the government doubled the maximum compensation for the wounded to £570,000, protected servicemen’s places on NHS waiting lists, and funded university for those leaving after six years. In July 2009 he said the sentence that embarrassed a government: “If I moved in an American helicopter, it’s because I haven’t got a British helicopter.”
He paid for it. Observers believed, in the words of The Times, that he “would have risen all the way to Chief of the Defence Staff were it not for his tendency to tell it like it is.” He has described the weight of those years: “hardly a day went by when I wasn’t informed about the death of a soldier or very serious injury of soldiers... the protocol was my staff wouldn’t tell me until they knew it wasn’t Bertie,” his own son, then serving. His record carries a late blemish: the House of Lords suspended him for four months last December over paid parliamentary services, a finding he accepted without appeal. The lesson of Dannatt is that the covenant runs both ways, and that a chief who keeps his side of it may forfeit his own advancement.
David Richards arrived in Sierra Leone in May 2000 as a brigadier with orders to evacuate British nationals from a capital about to fall to the Revolutionary United Front. He did that, and then he did what his orders did not cover. “I had no orders to do this,” he said years later. “It was a risk, but not a gamble.” Freetown held. He received the DSO for leadership and “moral courage,” and ten years on called it “the best thing I have ever done in the British Army... You can’t look at a little kid with his hand chopped off and just walk away.”
From May 2006 to February 2007 he commanded NATO’s force in Afghanistan, by his own description “the first British general to command American troops at theatre level since the Second World War.” Only 85 percent of the troops pledged by NATO members had arrived. In September 2006 the Taliban chose to stand and fight in Panjwayi, and Operation Medusa, NATO’s biggest ground operation to that point, broke them. Richards called it “a damned near-run thing.” He told the alliance the truth about time: “If we collectively... do not exploit this winter to start achieving concrete and visible improvement,” Afghans would “rather have that austere and unpleasant life” under the Taliban “than another five years of fighting.” His Musa Qala truce with tribal elders was widely criticized as a concession to the insurgents, and he defended it even as the town fell back to the Taliban in his final days in command.
He described the other part of the job to PBS that winter: “every time I write a letter home to the parents or wife of someone who has been killed, you feel something up your spine.” When Kabul fell in August 2021 he did not hide. “I’m almost ashamed that we are in this position,” he said, and accepted a “share of the blame.” The King made him an honorary Field Marshal in June 2025. This spring, on the Strait of Hormuz, he said the allies “ought to now get behind the Americans and work with them.” The lesson of Richards is composure inside a coalition, and the willingness to act on judgment when orders lag behind events.
“Courage under fire is the easy kind to honor. The harder kind speaks up the chain of command, and the rarest kind stays to answer for the dead.”
Dan Goldfus began in Shayetet 13, the naval commandos, commanded the Nahal Brigade, and by 2023 commanded the 98th Division, the paratroop and commando formation Israel keeps for its hardest ground. On October 7 he was, in the Prime Minister’s Office’s words, “among the first commanders who went to the sector and directed the combat from its first minutes.” In December his division entered Khan Yunis and spent roughly a hundred days there; by the end of July it had destroyed 100 kilometers of tunnels. He did not send men underground and wait at the entrance. The Jerusalem Post reported that he “insisted on entering a huge number of tunnels himself to see them up close despite the extra risk to his person.”
On March 13, 2024, at a press conference on the Gaza border, he finished his approved statement, opened a handwritten notebook, and spoke to Israel’s politicians “from both sides.” “We bow our heads over our resounding failure on October 7,” he said, and then: “you need to be worthy of us. You need to be worthy of the soldiers who lost their lives. You need to be worthy of the reservists who don’t care what side they are on, and fought and fight alongside each other.” He added what commanders rarely put on the record: “We will not run, just as we don’t run from the fire. We will not run from responsibility.”
Two days later Halevi gave him a “severe reprimand” for “acting contrary to what was expected of a senior commander in the IDF.” Goldfus accepted it, apologized for the manner, and kept the substance: “we fight together, so I think we can also live together.” The army promoted him twice anyway. By August 2024 he had lost 182 soldiers and regretted not having visited all their families. “That will happen now,” he said. Since September 2025 he has commanded the Depth Corps, responsible for Israel’s enemies beyond its borders. The lesson of Goldfus is that the commander who goes into the tunnel first earns the standing to speak for the men behind him, and that he accepts the discipline that follows.
Herzi Halevi was born in Jerusalem six months after his uncle, a paratrooper also named Herzi Halevi, was killed in the 1967 battle for the Old City. He took the IDF’s top post on January 16, 2023, vowing to keep politics out of the army, and he held it on the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Five days after October 7 he said what no one else in the leadership had yet said: “The IDF is responsible for the security of the country and its citizens, and on Saturday morning in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip, we did not handle it.” On Memorial Day 2024, at the Western Wall, he told the bereaved: “I am the commander who sent your sons and daughters to the battle from which they did not return, and to the posts from which they were kidnapped.”
His resignation letter of January 21, 2025 has one sentence the country will remember: “My responsibility for this terrible failure accompanies me every day, every hour, and will remain with me for the rest of my life.” It ends: “I will always be a soldier of the State of Israel.” At the handover on March 5, in front of the prime minister, he called a state commission of inquiry “necessary and vital. Not to find someone to blame, but first and foremost to reach the source of the problems and allow for repair.” His wife Sharon stood beside him with dozens of colored bracelets on her wrists, each from the family of a fallen soldier she had visited.
Then he went quiet, and he went to the cemeteries. On November 6, 2025 he stood in the Kfar Saba military cemetery as Staff Sgt. Oz Daniel, killed at 19 on October 7, his body held in Gaza for two years, was buried. The father, Amir Daniel, turned to him from the graveside: “Despite and perhaps because of all the burden you carry on your shoulders, you know how to take responsibility.” Maariv reported that he asks each family’s permission before he comes and stands in the crowd rather than with the dignitaries. Not every family wants him. Itzik Bonzel, whose son Amit fell in Gaza, wrote that his presence at the funerals is “intolerable.” Halevi keeps asking, and goes where he is welcome.
Herzi Halevi at a memorial to a fallen soldier in the Negev. Photo via Rabbi Elchanan Poupko.
Seven weeks from an election in which four former generals are running, he has joined no party and, as the Jerusalem Post’s Yonah Jeremy Bob noted, has gone more than a year “without making his own case publicly.” The photograph in this edition reached me this weekend from Rabbi Elchanan Poupko, who tells his readers the stories of Israel’s fallen; the credit for the reminder is his. It shows him in a checked shirt at a memorial stone in the Negev, beside a couple and the engraved face of a young man on the plaque. Poupko’s caption said it plainly: “He is going from grave to grave and humbly honoring Israel’s fallen.” The lesson of Halevi is that accountability cannot be delegated, and that it does not end with a resignation.
The instruction for the next generation of commanders is plain.
First, presence. Kurilla in the alley and Goldfus in the tunnel commanded formations that knew the man at the top had taken the same risk himself, and that knowledge moves soldiers in ways an order cannot.
Second, learn the war you are in. Odierno relearned Iraq between 2003 and 2007. The enemy of the last 25 years has never fought the war the planners wrote: tunnels under Gaza by the hundred kilometers, and 650 ballistic missiles fired at Israel in the 40 days of this year’s war. Superior technology does not excuse a commander from humility.
Third, tell the truth upward and accept the price. Dannatt’s interview, Richards’s winter warning, and Goldfus’s notebook each cost the speaker something, and each was right. A commander who will not say the hard thing to his own government has confused loyalty with silence.
Fourth, define the end state before the first strike. Kurilla, speaking as a civilian six weeks before this year’s war with Iran began, put the questions in the order every planner should: “What is our strategy? What is the end state we’re trying to achieve?” As this newsletter has previously written, victory means the adversary’s defeat, not his management.
Fifth, accountability cannot be delegated. Halevi resigned. Odierno said he would live with the dead for the rest of his life. Richards accepted a share of the blame for Kabul. The commander who owns the failure keeps the trust of the force. The one who parcels it out loses it.
The commanders’ side of the covenant is above. The citizens’ side is simpler and less often kept.
Dannatt named it in 2007: “the real covenant is with the population at large, the nation.” Odierno named the second half at his last briefing: “we also cannot forget those families whose sons or daughters or husbands or wives gave their lives... We have to remain connected to them.” A nation keeps its side by resourcing the force it sends, by caring for the wounded when they come home, and by staying connected to the families after the funerals end.
There is a third obligation, and this anniversary tests it. Citizens honor the wrong thing when they honor only the unblemished record. The one who failed and said so, out loud, in writing, and in front of the prime minister, and who then went to the graves, has given his country something more useful than a perfect record. He has shown what accountability looks like when no one can compel it.
On Friday the names will be read at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. The commanders who answered that morning are retired now, or dead, or, like Halevi, standing in a crowd at someone else’s funeral. There will be seven silences this year instead of six; the seventh is for those who have died since of the illnesses that morning caused. The covenant the six men kept from their side is now the citizens’ to keep from theirs.
This Sunday edition is free for every reader. The premium Long View, the full archive, the quarterly threat briefings, and reply access are for premium members: $12 a month or $100 a year. Every MEF donor reads free; if your invitation has not arrived, write [email protected].
Go PremiumAmerican service members who died in the wars that followed September 11, by the Costs of War project’s figure. Britain buried 636 more from Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel’s fallen in combat since October 7, 2023 stand at 968. The commanders in this essay wrote the letters home.
Tomorrow’s special edition previews the UN General Assembly: high-level week runs September 18 to 28, and the general debate opens on September 22. The daily editions resume after the New York stop on Wednesday. Last Monday’s free Long View, The Empire That Isn’t, answered the Times’ five-years-after-Kabul verdict, and last Sunday’s premium Long View, The Anti-Woke Diaspora, profiled the exile voices the Iran fight runs through. New readers can orient with the Field Guide; the MEF Dispatch, our summary of new articles and analysis from meforum.org, is one click: Subscribe to the MEF Dispatch.
Boston and Philadelphia are behind us. One stop remains: New York, this Wednesday, on Iran’s reach into American life.
New York · Wednesday, September 9 · The Tentacles of the Outlaws: Iran’s Reach into American Life
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