I am a United States Army general, and I lost the “global war on terror.” It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous; step one is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. So do my peers. And thanks to our problem, now all of America has a problem, to wit: two lost campaigns and a war gone awry.

I was never the overall commander in either Afghanistan or Iraq. You’d find me lower down the food chain, but high enough. I commanded a one-star advisory team in Iraq in 2005–06, an Army division (about 20,000 soldiers) in Baghdad in…