From Time...

[harg]

[Combat experience] puts you in a position not to think of war as an abstraction but as a very real event of significant suffering. If you don't personally have that experience, then putting people around you who have that experience is important. In the Bush Administration's case, there was only one person who had anything close to that experience, and that was Colin Powell, the one person they listened to the least.

Republican Sen Chuck Hagel