With a combined 50-plus years in military service, Major General Dana J.H. Pittard, U.S. Army (Retired) and Master Sergeant Wes J. Bryant, U.S. Air Force (Retired) give a first hand look at once-secretive operations, recounting their personal experiences of the dramatic scenes that splashed across newspapers at home throughout the past two decades, the authors share their personal testimony to the growing extremism not only in the Middle East, but around the world.
DANA J.H. PITTARD retired from the U.S. Army in 2015 at the rank of Major General after thirty-four years of active duty service. He was a highly decorated combat leader and commanded units at every echelon from platoon through division, including multiple combat tours in Iraq and the Middle East. In 2014, he was chosen to lead the initial U.S. response to halt the aggressive spread of ISIS in Iraq.
Dana has earned a Bachelor of Science in History from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, a master’s degree from the School of Advanced Military Studies at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University as a Senior Fellow. Currently he is Vice President of Defense for Allison Transmissions, and provides defense analysis and commentating for major television news networks. You can see him regularly on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. For more on Dana visit www.danajhpittard.com.
WES J. BRYANT retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 at the rank of Master Sergeant after twenty years of active duty service. Embedded with Special Forces teams under a Navy SEAL task force, Wes was the tactical lead for a contingent of special operations JTACs to first set foot in Iraq to stop ISIS. As the senior enlisted JTAC to establish the BIAP Strike Cell, Bryant coordinated and controlled the first airstrikes against ISIS in the Baghdad region. He later deployed as the senior Special Tactics JTAC for special operations task forces hunting ISIS in Syria and Afghanistan.
Wes is now a defense and national security analyst with focus on foreign policy and global conflict, counterterrorism and extremism, strike and joint targeting operations, and civilian harm mitigation. In 2024, he was a lead member of a special senate task force conducting analysis and assessment of US, allied, and adversary practices and conduct in warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation, and directly advised Congress toward national security policy reform. He has been an outspoken opponent of Israel’s operations in Gaza and conducted analysis for numerous investigations into Israeli military actions against Palestinian civilians. He was formerly a senior policy analyst and advisor on precision warfare and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where he led as the first-ever Branch Chief of Civilian Harm Assessments