Colonel peter mansoor biography of albert einstein

You had a limited number of electives that didn't qualify as majors in the accreditation sense so I spent most of my electives on History. I spent most of my electives on History, and a smattering of other things, as well. You have to take an engineering sequence, and when the time came, I took the Honors' sequence in civil engineering. It was kind of an interesting combination.

CW: Were your parents supportive of your choice to join the military? I really couldn't go, because we lacked the funding to pay for it. Back then, the endowments at these private universities are not what they are today, where they can offer you a full ride. She was, I think, a little hesitant about me going into the military, but over my 4 years at West Point, she became my biggest fan.

I'd call her every Sunday, back in the days of payphones, I'd wait in line in the basement of my barracks, and get to the front, and put the coins in the machine, call collect, and we'd talk for an hour. I'd unload all my burdens on her, and then the next week, she'd go, "Well what happened about this? She was very supportive, in the end.

PM: Yeah, very much so. Now, half of the companies at West Point in my year group shuffled after two years, and they got new company-mates and then half did not, and we were one of the companies, I-3, the "Polar Bears", that did not shuffle. I was with the same set of fellow cadets for 4 years, and we became very tight, we still have reunions almost on an annual basis outside the official reunions at West Point.

Our wives have since become close friends, too. We've got great stories and life experiences to share with each other. CW: So when it came to choosing your specialty, how did you go about PM: I didn't choose engineers in the end, and as the top graduate, I had the number one pick. I think it was the influence of mentors, two of my history professors who I really admired were both armor officers.

I had studied a lot of World War II history where armored warfare had such a big impact, and I think I became enamored with being a tank commander, and so I chose armor. It was very unusual, normally in a class, the top 5 graduates are all engineers, back then. Today, a lot of them would go infantry. In my year group, the number one, three, and five rank cadets all went armor, so three of the five top, it was a big coup for the armor branch.

It was a great choice. I like having 67 tons of steel around me when I go to combat. CW: You have a picking day, and then I can't remember what the terms are called for the ceremonies where you choose and then you get assigned. PM: You choose your branch, that's done, I wouldn't say electronically back then, but it's done outside of a big auditorium.

Then, they put everyone in the class in a big auditorium, once you have your branch, and now you have a post-selection, so they start with the number one cadet, and they go down to the last one, and you choose where you're going to go. I knew I wanted to be an armored cavalry regiment. There were three in the Army's organization at the time, one in the United States, two in Germany.

I didn't want to go to Germany. This is going to sound funny, but I wanted to meet girls. I didn't colonel peter mansoor biography of albert einstein what the prospects would be if I didn't speak the language, so I chose the armored cavalry regiment that was in the United States, and what, it worked for me, because I met my wife in Fort Bliss, in El Paso, and still had a great time, in a professional sense.

PM: It was different. I had a great company commander, Jeff Kieffer, a wonderful squadron commander, Leonard D. Holder, who commanded the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Gulf war, and later retired as a 3 star general. They were exceptional mentors. Jeff Kieffer has become a good friend, I'm godfather to his daughter, he was in my wedding, and so we've continued our relationship to this day.

I loved the training there in the desert, Fort Bliss has an enormous maneuver area, so we got to do a lot of maneuver training, where other posts are often more constrained. We deployed to Germany, for 6 weeks, for what's called a reforger exercise, return of forces to Germany. Had an excellent experience over there, in the German countryside, maneuvering around, dodging civilian cars, crossing farmers' fields.

It was all great fun if no one was shooting at you. El Paso proved to be a town with a lot to offer. Eventually, I did meet my wife in a wine tasting class. Number 1 was church, I said, "That's probably not going to happen. Since I didn't really spend a lot of time in the grocery store, I said, "That's probably not going to happen. I go, "Ah, night school.

I'm going down through the courses offered, and I get to "World of Wine, learn how wine is made and tasted. The second class, I show up, and there's no one in the classroom. I go to the registrar at El Paso Community College, and there's only 10 classes, so I missed two of them, I say "I want to drop the class, I need my money back. Call him in the morning, and see if you can, you know, figure it out, and if not, we'll refund your money.

In the morning, I call the number, and it's like, "Skelly's Gas Station", and in the back you hear this makes drill noiseand I go, "Is Mike there? Be there next week, it's a lot of fun. The next week, I show up, a little bit late, and there's a long table, a screen on one end, on the left. On the right is the instructor with his carousel of slides, you know the old slide carousel, and then a couple of married couples next to him are clearly interested in learning about wine.

Mike, in the middle, who you could tell from his striped garage shirt and name tag, "Mike", and on the other end of the table, five sorority sisters. I immediately go down, sit right in the middle of them, and say, "Hi, I'm Pete. They can't leave, what can they do? My future wife, Jana, was sitting across the table. We eventually made eyes and hit it off and then I learned that she was a history major in college and was interested in military history.

That was something in common, anyway that's how I met my bride. CW: At Fort West, what was your expectation of service abroad? Did you expect to see combat or were your expectations? PM: I certainly knew it was a possibility because those were the final days of the cold war. The Russians had built up their forces in Europe and those were the days of Regan and the evil empire and we're going to consignment it to the dust bin of history.

This to when I'm in Fort Bliss. I knew that war was a possibility, but it didn't seem wholly likely at the time. There was a balance of power on the european continent and didn't think the soviets would be foolish enough to cross the inter-German boarder and unleash Armageddon. It was always in the back of my mind and if not there, maybe somewhere else.

CW: You said you never expected to make this a career. When did that start, did that start to change early on or was that? PM: As a first lieutenant, I had thoughts of getting out and going into computer programming or one of the high tech industries that was developing. I want to serve in an armored cavalry regiment over there. Then I got married, now I'm taking my wife with me and we had a wonderful time in Germany.

We can talk about those days. At the end of that assignment, now it's what do I did? Well I put in for graduate school, graduate training in military history and now I have opportunity for the Army to pay for a masters degree and go back to West Point and teach. Which I did, well by that time you got twelve years in service and you only have eight more years till you're eligible for retirement pay.

Why not stay in? It's this incremental decision making process that I got involved in. CW: You mentioned you moved to Germany. What was that second deployment like, moving from Fort Bliss, Texas, newly married. PM: Yeah, it's just a permanent change of station colonel peter mansoor biography of albert einstein. It was really interesting, my wife and I got married in December, actually we eloped.

I needed to get her on my orders to Germany and back then if you weren't married before your orders were processed, you had to go over to Germany alone and then request commands sponsorship which could take three or four months. We didn't want to be apart for that time. She also didn't want anyone to know that we were married before we were married.

We drove up to Albuquerque from El Paso, where Jeff and Nancy Keiffer are good friends were in graduate school and we got married up there before a judge, Judge Tommy Jewell. We were officially married, I processed the paperwork, she got on my orders. Now we could go over together and then we were married in December of Yeah, that was about ten months later, nine months later.

The official church wedding in which everyone said, "You're so calm. Why are you not nervous? This is now almost sixteen years later, I'm at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and I'm in a small group, my staff group, staff group We're just introducing each other at the beginning of the school year. He goes on to talk about his military experience and then I piped up, "Oh, that's really interesting.

My wife and I got married in Albuquerque. I always remember it's before a judge and we was quite the personality, Judge Tommy Jewell. Anyway going back, we got married, we went to the honeymoon in Vail for ten days and then went back to El Paso. Soon boarded the plane to Germany and I remember my wife shedding tears as the plane was taking off. I was like, "Oh my God, what have I done?

She had been away from home but she'd always stayed in Texas. Now she's going to the other side of the world, that wasn't the worst of it. We land in Germany and we're getting the van taking us to Bad Hersfeld, my duty station and it's like we've landed in Siberia. It's the coldest winter in fifty years in Europe. There was ice and snow everywhere and I'm like, "This is the ice planet Hoth," unbelievable.

Then we struggle to find an apartment. We finally do find one and almost immediately, a month after we settle in I go off on maneuvers for six weeks, a squadron exercise called War Steed.

Colonel peter mansoor biography of albert einstein

That was a real eye opener to both of us. We lived in a building with both officer and non-commission officer and enlisted families. One of the enlisted soldiers was married to a German woman who was certifiably nuts. Every time he went off for training, she would get mad at him because apparently he wasn't suppose to leave her and she'd throw his clothes out the window into the front yard of this apartment complex.

That happened while we were gone. Then for me, War Steed, it was pretty difficult. It was really cold, a lot of the heaters didn't work. One of my fellow officers, I was a personnel officer of the squardron S1. One of my fellow officers, the logistician, the S4, we'll let him do his job. He had reconnoitered the area for the field trains locations where we were going to set up the logistics base.

He put it on top of a mountain. Now putting trucks, lots of trucks on top of a mountain when there's lots of ice and snow on the roads is not exactly the right thing to do. After a couple of days, maybe two or three days of the exercise, we determine we have to get off this mountain. There's been lots of trucks sliding into ditches, we can't do our jobs.

We decide to colonel peter mansoor biography of albert einstein the fuel trains to a flat area off of a paved road, much better area. Day comes and he is no where to be seen and he's suppose to lead this operation and he has disappeared. He's got a vehicle, at the time I thinks a Chevy Suburban now or it's called a Cut-V back then.

He has this vehicle and he just takes off, I'm not even sure where he is and I'm in a truck, like a deuce and a half. We try to get down the way we came in and all the big fuel trucks and ammunition trucks are sliding off into ditches. The recovery effort is just unbelievable. I just called time out and I say, "Stop, we're not getting down this way.

If we do, someone's going to die. I walk the trail all the way up to where it intersects with a paved road. I said, "Hey, we can do this. Some of these vehicles they huge heavy expanded mobility tactical trucks with trailers on them. We're trying to back them up into places where they can turn around. We finally get the whole convoy turned around, moving on this trail and there's this one little incline left before you get to the road.

It's enough to make vehicles slide back down, so I dismount all the soldiers, I have them get their picks and shovels, break up the ice, throw dirt and pine needles and branches on the road. One by one we gunned the vehicles up the hill, and we finally get them all out of there without killing anyone. We get down to our new site, but we're now hours late, and I get there, and the Squadron Executive Officer is a Major and I'm a Captain, starts chewing me out for being late.

Now the food, and the fuel, and the ammunition aren't going to be delivered on time, and I don't even bother to tell him what had just transpired because he probably wouldn't care. It's a story that's always stuck with me of an example of how you have to do the right thing even if no one's looking, even if you're not going to get rewarded for it in the end.

I don't consider it one of the highlights of my career, but the fact that we didn't lose anyone on that mountain, might have been actually. CW: As you were talking I was thinking, oh this is maybe where he makes his first mark, but not so much. PM: Well actually, I was the Squadron Personnel Officer S1 for almost two years which really is unusual, but there was a backlog of Captains trying to get into command, and it took me awhile to get a command position.

All of the civilian staff would report to me and then I would liaise with the Squadron Commander down range. We were at the time, you know you wouldn't see this today, but at the time we were a single armored cavalry squad with maybe a thousand soldiers, and that was our post. We had our own community, our own officers club, and non-commissioned officers club, it was just like a miniature Fort Hood for a thousand people and their families.

It was really a big responsibility for me to end up taking charge of the families and the rear detachment, and the post when the squadron deployed. One of the events that happened there, the squadrons at Hohenfels doing training and 58th Engineer Company, our engineer company was doing training with cratering charges. Cratering charges have two safeties, one is pin that you pull and the other is the safety on the clacker so.

The clacker is supposed to have a pin that you can depress it part way and it won't make contact, and then you give it a good squeezed and it will make contact and the cratering charge will do it's thing. This Sergeant from the 58th Engineer Company was training his squad on cratering charges and he's showing them these two safeties. The chain of command earlier in the day had gone around looking at the classes that people were teaching, and they warned him, do not pull the safety from the cratering charge.

They were using a live cratering charge as a training aid, well sure enough he has too much faith in the clacker safety. Pulls the other one and says, "See there's this other safety. You can immediately see the shit storm that developed from that, it went all the way up the Presidential level and Ronald Reagan actually made a comment about it.

About taking care of the soldiers and their families. That was hard for me I had a lot of Casualty Assistance Officers that I was in charge of, getting them transportation, families coming over. Investigations being conducted, and I was right in the middle of all that. I think the hardest thing was the brother of the Sergeant who had led the training called me from the States.

He was just incensed, he wanted people's head on a platter, what's the name of the Squadron Commander, what's the name of the Company Commander, who's the Platoon Leader. Basically wanting them drawn and quartered, and I was talking to him about what was happening in terms of an investigation and so forth. Finally he goes, "Who was colonel peter mansoor biography of albert einstein of that class?

Pretty tough to deal with that kind of personal anguish, but again one more learning experience in the quiver. CW: How were you responsible, compared to the explosion, what was your responsibility to that? PM: Well I was back at the home base, if you will. The families wanted to know what was happening, people and people would call from United States they would call the base, they wouldn't call Hohenfels so I'm fielding a lot of calls and media requests.

Trying to get Casualty Assistance Officers assigned to the families, you know some of the dead their families were there living on base, so we had to take care of them. It made for some long hours, but we got it done. Ty Pierce: You mentioned you weren't there that long and you had six weeks out in the field, and it was a bit of a wake up call for you and Joanna.

TP: As this progresses and you're put in positions like this where you a pretty large amount of responsibility at Captain level. How's that interplay between work and home, so to speak? How's you relationship developing and changing? PM: Well Jana is a great army spouse, she realized that my career came first and I spent long hours at work throughout my career and she managed.

That's not true in all cases and it does lead in weaker relationships to divorce, if you have a needy spouse who has to have you there all the time, the military is probably not for you. That was not the case with us, so she was always supportive and if I had to be at work, I had to be at work. On the other hand I was at least coming home every night as the S1 being on base, while the squadron when it was deployed, they were gone.

They were in Germany but they were not there, so we actually considered ourselves fortunate in that regard. Let me talk to you a little bit about the fun aspects of being in Germany, because my wife and I always remember that being our favorite assignment. Probably because we didn't have kids, we didn't have any responsibilities. When you weren't on duty there were a lot of four day weekends, and we could take leave, which we did.

I was a true believer throughout my military career of actually taking all of my leave every year. When I got to the end, often when you get to an end of a career, people will take days of terminal leave or sell back days, these enormous amounts they've accrued at deployment. I had 26 days left. That enabled us to do a lot of fun things.

We traveled all over Europe, probably didn't save a lot of money in our first three years of marriage, but I figured you know we're young and vigorous now. We can travel now and when we're in our 70's or 80's, when we have the money we could hobble around live a little bit better. We decided to basically splurge and see Europe upfront, and it was great.

Lots of places in Germany, so it was a blast. My mom and step dad came over, so we got to have vacations with them in Paris and London. Then there were unit trips as well, ski trips to Austria, and since I was a colonel peter mansoor biography of albert einstein, I would often arrange them to resorts I wanted to go to like Innsbruck and Solden, and then we'd have unit trips to Spanish beaches in the summer.

We went to Barcelona and the beach near Barcelona once and these were just really wonderful experiences. Sometimes with the company, so you have officers and enlisted mixed up, and that worked out fine, and the barrier was always kept. Sometimes it was just officers. Officer ski trips, but they were always a blast, people you knew and could have a really good time with.

Then on post when you were there, every Thursday was pizza night in the officer's club. Once my daughter Kyle was born, in Novemberwe'd bring her bucket with her to the club, and just put the bucket on a table and all the lieutenants would take turns holding her, taking care of her. You wouldn't even worry about the kid disappearing, because you knew everyone in the place, and so it was really a tight-knit community.

People who served during the Cold War, I think, in Germany, remember that tightness of the communities that the mission engendered and the closeness of the families engendered. It wasn't all bad. PM: Oh yeah. Yeah, these were morale welfare recreation trips, and definitely families were included. PM: My tour in Germany was supposed to be three years, but I took command late, and so I extended it by 6 months in order to take command of Mike Company, the Maulers, 3rd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and that was really the highlight of the first 10 years of my service commanding 60, 70 soldiers, 14 M1A1 tanks, brand new too, so that was nice.

We got to get them out of the packing crates, if you will. We had a maneuver in Hohenfels where we did very, very well. I think the highlight though was in November and December of '89 when the wall came down, people remember people chipping away at the Berlin wall. They forget, at the same time, the iron curtain came down, that is this enormous fence that went from Austria all the way up to the North Sea.

My company took over border duty in early December, I think it was. It wasn't right when the wall came down. It might have been late November, but it might have been a couple weeks after the wall was opened, but the iron curtain was just opening, and so for three, four weeks, we got to be on the grid iron of history watching and reporting as the Germans were taking down the fence, reuniting communities that in many cases had not been united in 40 years.

I remember in one case, two sisters who were in their 60's or 70's who had been separated for 40 years, right across the border from one another, came and met at the border and hugged one another. Germans celebrating in their typical way with oompah bands and beer and bratwurst and thanking you, the American soldiers, for being there for them and making this happen, or helping to make it happen.

It was really a signature time in my early career. They kept the fences up, the guard towers, they have a museum dedicated to the Cold War, and almost no one goes there because it's in the middle of Germany where it's just not a tourist place. I've actually tried to take student groups from Ohio State there, and you can't get there from here.

You realize how remote these places were, where you'd have to spend almost two days of a study-abroad trip to dedicate to that. I'd still like to do it one day, but we haven't been able to make it happen yet. Anyway, these three border posts, I would have a platoon at each. In some cases, two platoons. We'd park our tanks, so they'd be there in case we needed them, but then we would patrol in Humvees, and we'd send out patrols continuously to report on what was happening, and then we had aviation overhead from the air cav squadron, and they would be reporting as well on what was happening.

The number of openings in the fence that was being reported up through the military chain of command all the way to the National Security Council, it was really very wonderful time, time when freedom reigned for a brief period, at any rate. PM: No. At least not to my knowledge. I told them to politely decline the beer. Actually some of them were presented pieces of the fence, and I still have a piece of the fence to this day.

That was neat. That's actually another widget that I should probably offer to you. PM: The fence was actually made in West Germany. A West Germany company made the fence, they sold it to the East Germans. The East Germans erected, but it's this It's not barbed wire or concertina, it's a very close-knit mesh, but tough, with openings maybe half an inch, and it's diamond-shaped openings.

Very difficult to climb which was the whole point; they didn't want people escaping. I think the Germans, the West Germans participated in creating that fence, even though the profited from it, I'm pretty sure, because escaping was really dangerous, and they didn't want people getting blown up in the mine fields and whatnot, so making sure that it was hard to escape.

Not, maybe, the humanitarian thing to do. CW: As you're sitting there watching the wall come down in front of your eyes. CW: The curtain. Were there discussions going on like, "We don't need to be here anymore", or "What's our presence here doing now? PM: We were I was a captain, and people I was commanding were lieutenants and sergeants and enlisted soldiers, we were just taking in the moment.

We weren't thinking longer term. I knew, for me, in terms of career, that the Cold War was over, and that we were entering an inter war period. I didn't realize the Gulf War was only six months away. I decided in an inter war period, the best thing to do is to go back to school, and that's when I put in my packet to go back to graduate school and teach at West Point.

That was my first experience in a civilian community since I had been in high school. Great experience here in Columbus at Ohio State. My PhD advisors, Allan Millett, Williamson Murray, and other military history instructors like Joe Guilmartin, Joe Kruzel who was my minor field advisor in national security and policy studies, and John Rule, who was my advisor in early modern European history, just wonderful trainers and mentors, educators, and it really opened my eyes to the broader issues at stake in warfare, and not just how to maneuver tanks around a battlefield.

I got some of that at West Point, of course, but it doesn't stick until you really study it in depth, and the two years here at Ohio State, getting a Master's degree and going ABD and finishing my coursework for my PhD and my general exams really I think broadened my outlook and that's when I started to think about, "Okay, what next for the United States Army and the nation now that we're out of the Cold War?

In terms of my family life here in Columbus, we lived in a condominium up in Dublin. My daughter went to daycare, my wife was a paralegal working at a temp agency, but mostly she worked at Ashland Chemical and then down in the US Attorney's office downtown, working on asset forfeitures. We both loved Columbus. When we left here, we thought we'd never be back, and surprise, here we are.

One possibility to improve this state of affairs is to rotate the same units back to the same areas in future tours, as the Marines did in a number of cases in Al Anbar Province in Iraq. There is currently a contentious debate over the future of warfare — whether it will resemble Iraq and Afghanistan or whether there will be a return to major combat operations against great or medium sized powers.

You argue that the Army was not structured for counterinsurgency inthat the focus on net-centric warfare and the revolution in military affairs in the s was actually five to ten years behind in terms of the evolution of warfare and that the Army still has a ways to go in tailoring its structure for counterinsurgency. What do you see as the likelihood of a near to medium term conflict with a great or medium size power?

Does the recent conflict in South Ossetia portend future conventional conflict? There is always the potential for a state-on-state conflict, and our military forces need to be prepared to engage in conventional warfare should the need arise. But given the overwhelming conventional superiority of our military forces, it is unlikely that we will be challenged in this manner in the near future.

Saddam Hussein tried twice, and the lesson he gave the world has not gone unheeded. Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the other hand, have had more strategic success at a fraction of the cost. In my view the United States needs to learn how to effectively prosecute counterinsurgency operations and structure its forces to do so, or we will find ourselves challenged in this manner again in the near future.

This does not mean we should abandon training for high intensity combat. Clearly, a balance must be struck in this regard once our forces disengage from Iraq and Afghanistan. Until then, we need to fight the wars we have, not the ones we want. What do you think needs to be done in Afghanistan? How does our current strategy there compare to our pre strategy in Iraq?

Will the same basic principles of counterinsurgency — clear, hold, build to separate the insurgents from the population; involving locals; civil-military coordination; etc. What should be done about the circumstances specific to Afghanistan such as the poppy cultivation, Pakistan and the political realities of operating as part of NATO? The counterinsurgency strategy used to turn around the war in Iraq, particularly the emphasis on securing the population to insulate them from insurgent and terrorist intimidation, can work in Afghanistan as well.

But we should not think that the provision of a few more brigade combat teams and a new strategic approach will succeed in turning around the war effort in Afghanistan any time soon. In Iraq you can see a way forward — Iraq has all the makings of a modern state once it agrees on a way forward politically. The Afghan population is mostly illiterate.

If we want to see Afghanistan succeed as a state, then we need to build our force structure and strategy there for the long haul. We not only have to counter the Taliban insurgency, but we will have to build the Afghan state as well. Having said this, the key to countering the Taliban insurgency and destroying the Al Qaeda safe haven, for that matter lies in Pakistan, not in Afghanistan.

This is a very difficult issue, given that our forces cannot operate across the border in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of western Pakistan, where the Taliban enjoys sanctuary. Sitting back across the Afghan-Pakistan border and plinking targets in the FATA with Hellfire missiles fired from unmanned aerial vehicles is a strategy for defeat, as the political backlash in Pakistan will do more harm than the good done by the few terrorists killed by the attacks.

We must convince the Pakistani government, therefore, that it is their national interest to embark on a counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. References [ edit ]. Society for Military History web site. Retrieved Mansoor Faculty Profile". Mansoor, Council on Foreign Relations". Council on Foreign Relations web site. Authority control databases.

Toggle the table of contents. Peter Mansoor. Add languages Add topic. Peter Mansoor, Colonel, U. Army Retiredis the General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair of Military History and a frequent media commentator on national security affairs. He assumed this position in September after a year career in the U. He also served on the Joint Staff as the special assistant to the Director for Strategic Plans and Policy during a period that included the Bosnian peace support operation, Operation Desert Fox, and the Kosovo conflict.