Barry Richard McCaffrey (born 17 November 1942) is a retired United States Army general and current news commentator, professor and business consultant who served in President Bill Clinton's Cabinet as the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Kern had deployed his command post–two M-577 armored personnel carriers full of communications equipment–within a protective cordon of M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, which guarded the perimeter of the airfield.

However, (more than) half the Republican Guard, including the nearly intact Hammurabi Division, escaped the enveloping "left hook," leaving a legacy of controversy about whether General Frederick Franks' VII Corps had moved quickly enough.

The vivid descriptions of the resulting carnage were probably a significant factor in the decision to halt military operations.,[20] extensively quoting from It Doesn't Take A Hero, the autobiography of General Schwarzkopf with Peter Petre.

[21]Describing the "left hook" battle plan and its aftermath, Schwarzkopf and Petre wrote, "General McCaffrey's mission was to leapfrog his units 300 miles (480 km) north and to occupy an 80-mile-by-60-mile zone with the Marines digging in around Al Jubayl.

General J. H. Binford Peay III was to establish bases along McCaffrey's left flank, from which his helicopters and troops could defend a 100-mile arc of desert to the north and west.

Eventually, Colonel Doug Starr's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment would arrive to take over that mission... On Saturday morning, 2 March 1991, two days after the shooting supposedly had stopped, I came into the war room (in Riyadh) to discover that we'd just fought a major battle in the Euphrates valley.

Twice, they'd encountered Bradley Fighting Vehicles operating as scouts for the 24th Mech(anized Division, under McCaffrey's command) and both times had opened fire with antitank missiles.

To me, this wasn't altogether bad news: the Republican Guard had shown characteristic arrogance by spotting what looked like a weak U.S. force–not suspecting that an entire U.S. Army division was in the way–and deciding, "Let's shoot 'em up."

[23]In a paper entitled "Detecting Massed Troops with the French SPOT Satellites: A Feasibility Study for Cooperative Monitoring,"[24] Vipin Gupta of Sandia National Laboratories and LTC George Harris, Commander, 250th Military Intelligence Battalion, extensively described and illustrated pre-battle and post-battle satellite images: The paper concluded, "The positive identification of troop positions was facilitated by the dramatic appearance of numerous secured encampments and the sudden disappearance of normal civilian traffic...

"[24] On 13 November 1993, CDR Daniel S. Zazworsky, USN, wrote an unclassified analysis of the "left hook" attack,[25] saying, "Major General McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division (Mech), also recognized the importance of capturing enemy resources for his own forces use.

While there is certainly utility in capturing enemy resources, the brevity of the war left it unclear whether or not LTGEN William G. Pagonis' and General McCaffrey's efforts would have been sufficient to enable the US to conduct a significantly prolonged offensive.

Colonel Dave Oberthaler, Logistics Staff Officer with the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) in the KTO (Kuwaiti Theater of Operations), also raises a valid concern with regard to captured Iraq fuel, food and drink–indicating that fear of contamination would have kept U.S. forces from using them.

[30] Remnick wrote, "In Iraq, General McCaffrey led the 24th Infantry Division in an epic 'left hook' tank drive, designed to shut off an Iraqi retreat from Kuwait.

Hersh, however, in the course of conducting hundreds of interviews and reviewing thousands of pages of government and Army documents, found a number of operations by men under McCaffrey's command that are, at a minimum, unsettling.

In testimony before the Senate and in written answers to questions from Hersh, whose repeated requests for an interview were declined, McCaffrey said that his men were fired on and he had no choice but to respond in force—with the full might of his division."

BBC reported that "General McCaffrey said an army investigation had previously cleared him of any blame, and he accused the New Yorker of maligning young soldiers... White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said President Bill Clinton felt the charges were unsubstantiated.

On May 26, 2006, Knight Ridder Washington, D.C. bureau chief John Walcott, honored Galloway, saying, "Mike Ruby, Merrill McLoughlin, and I sent Joe (Galloway) to Schwarzkopf's headquarters in Riyadh with the kind of simple request that editors like to make: Go get the best seat in the war.... General Schwarzkopf sent Joe to Maj. Gen. Barry McCaffrey's 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), which he said had the most complex and dangerous assignment in his battle plan, the famous left hook.

In a May 2000 interview with Sam Donaldson for the television news program This Week, Powell described the Hersh article as "attempted character assassination on General McCaffrey."

The decision surprises some in the Allied command structure in Saudi Arabia and causes unease among civilian and military leaders in Washington, who worry about the public relations ramifications of an attack that comes days after a cease-fire was implemented (see 28 February 1991).

[37] He wrote in August 1995 in "Human Rights and the Commander" in Joint Force Quarterly, "There is a common assumption that respect for an enemy's soldiers and its civilian populace can stand in the way of a successful military campaign.

[39] On 1 June 1996, at the commencement ceremony at the United States Military Academy, Secretary of Defense William Perry commended McCaffrey's performance during the Gulf War.

[46] He disliked the metaphor of a "war" on drugs, preferring to call it a malignancy for which he advocated treatment; at the same time, he also headed an initiative that began in 1999 to eliminate coca farming in Colombia.

"[53][54] He "supports an investigation of the government lawyers who knowingly advocated illegal torture, and he specifically cited Bush's White House counsel and attorney general in the same discussion, emphasizing that 'we better find out how we went so wrong.

[56] In the report, McCaffrey described U.S. senior military leadership team as superb and predicted the insurgency will reach its peak from January-to-September 2006, allowing for U.S. force withdrawals in the late summer of 2006.

They included the most celebrated of all military analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey, the retired Army four-star general who just happened to be the man excluded from the Pentagon's information program for criticizing Donald Rumsfeld's management of the Iraq war.

On Nov. 30, under the [second] front-page headline "One Man's Military-Industrial-Media Complex," Barstow wrote that McCaffrey represented an exclusive club of mostly retired generals whose "war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests[.]"

McCaffrey specifically cited Trump's tepid response to United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May's announcement that the Russian government was behind an alleged nerve gas attack on 4 March in Salisbury, England.

In January 2008, McCaffrey was elected to the board of directors of The HNTB Companies, an employee-owned organization of infrastructure firms known for their work in transportation, tolls, bridges, aviation, rail, architecture, urban design, and planning.

McCaffrey also serves on the boards of directors of Atlantic Council of the United States, DynCorp International, Global Linguist Solutions, McNeil Technologies, and CRC Health Group,[72] a nationwide for-profit chain of addiction treatment centers and behavioral therapy programs for related disorders.