Knife Fights Read online

  An important moment in the counterinsurgency learning process was a conference sponsored by Eliot Cohen, the bow-tie-wearing strategist from Johns Hopkins University, in the summer of 2005 in Basin Harbor, Maine. This conference brought together many old and new names in counterinsurgency, including Vietnam veteran and retired Army Colonel John Waghelstein, whose “Ruminations of a Pachyderm, or What I Learned in the Counterinsurgency Business” was one of the best articles I read while writing my doctoral thesis. Another ancient font of wisdom was T. X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel who challenged and almost defeated Waghelstein in the competition for the contested title of “crustiest curmudgeon” at the conference. It was at Basin Harbor that I met for the first time Kalev “Gunner” Sepp, a retired special forces officer who had previously been an artilleryman, or “Gunner”—an unusual enough step en route to the Green Beret that his special forces peers christened him with the nickname.

  Gunner had earned his Ph.D. at Harvard before teaching irregular warfare in West Point’s history department. When General Casey had assumed responsibility in Iraq from Lieutenant General Sanchez, Casey quickly recognized that he needed a counterinsurgency campaign plan, and Gunner had been called to Baghdad from his post at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, to help write it. As part of that work, Gunner researched the best and worst practices in past counterinsurgency campaigns—what worked, and what didn’t. The answers would have come as no surprise to David Galula or Gerald Templer: emphasize intelligence; focus on the population, its needs, and its security; establish and expand secure areas; and don’t concentrate military forces in large bases for protection or overemphasize killing or capturing the enemy rather than securing and engaging the populace. General Casey, who was unimpressed with the level of counterinsurgency knowledge in the force he was commanding, gave Gunner permission to publish his work in an unclassified format. It had just come out in the Fort Leavenworth journal Military Review, which was becoming an important outlet for dissidents writing about changes the Army needed to make to become more effective at counterinsurgency.

  Held at a beautiful resort in Maine just before the summer season made room rates too expensive for Johns Hopkins to afford, the Basin Harbor conference played an important role in introducing people and ideas to each other. It was at Basin Harbor that David Kilcullen and I met “Hank,” the CIA operator who had played a key role in bringing down the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. On the last day of the conference, Hank would gain a last name, as the State Department announced that he was being named the ambassador for counterterrorism. Ambassador Crumpton soon hired Dave Kilcullen as part of his team.

  The keynote speaker for the conference was Army Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, then serving as the assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, the building’s liaison officer to the secretary of state. Major General Odierno’s tactics while in command of the Fourth Infantry Division in Iraq in 2003–4 had drawn severe criticism for heavy-handedness, but he gave a speech at Basin Harbor that showed a growing appreciation for the cultural sensitivity and limited use of force that most of the conference participants agreed were essential to success in this kind of war. Odierno stuck around after his talk for a few beers in the Basin Harbor bar, partaking in a thoughtful exchange on some of the subtleties of counterinsurgency. He would later be appointed the operational level commander in Iraq, where under the command of David Petraeus many of these same ideas would be implemented in time, although there was lots of fighting and dying to be done before we got there.

  It didn’t help that we couldn’t agree on what the problem was. Secretary Rumsfeld had banned the use of the word insurgency to describe the situation we were facing in Iraq, publicly correcting vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace for using the word to describe current events in Iraq and even requesting that it be removed from the “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” when that document was published in 2005. An alcoholic can’t get better if he doesn’t admit that he’s an alcoholic, and a country can’t defeat an insurgency if it won’t admit that it’s fighting one. Changing course in Iraq would require Secretary Rumsfeld’s replacement, a difficult choice for President Bush, as Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney had been close friends for decades.

  During a frustrating year, there was some good news when the University of Chicago Press got in touch, sent by Newt Gingrich, and asked to publish Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam in paperback. They immediately understood that Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife was the correct title for the book, not the subtitle, and asked me to write a new preface to the book based on my recent experiences in Iraq. That preface, which I titled “Spilling Soup on Myself,” noted that while authors generally learn something about their subject matter, and then write about it, I had taken the opposite approach, writing the book before conducting counterinsurgency myself. It was, I now wrote, even harder than I’d realized, although I’d gotten many of the big ideas right: focus on protecting the population, prioritize intelligence and precision in targeting, and build mechanisms that allow the force to learn and adapt. The preface concluded by arguing that, to cope more effectively with the messy reality that in the twenty-first century many of our enemies will be insurgents, America’s armed forces must continue to adapt to counterinsurgency warfare.

  The University of Chicago Press also asked if there was anyone I could get to write a foreword to the paperback edition of the book. I knew that Speaker Gingrich had talked to General Peter Schoomaker, the chief of staff of the Army, about Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Schoomaker had then sent expensive hardcover copies of the book to all his subordinate four-star generals to read, spiking my sales on Amazon enough that I’d gotten a congratulatory email from the specialist at Fort Riley who still tracked my book’s ranking from afar. A number of the generals, in turn, had handed the book to their resident smart guys to read and summarize for them, and several of the majors and lieutenant colonels, in turn, asked me for a précis of my own book so that they wouldn’t have to read it themselves for their bosses! In good insurgent fashion, while he was waiting for a meeting with the habitually late Secretary Wolfowitz, I ambushed General Schoomaker and asked if he would be willing to write a foreword to the paperback. He quickly agreed and said nice things (or more likely, his staff said nice things) in the resulting foreword, calling the book “one that military leaders and interested citizens at all levels should read.”

  The rising interest in insurgency, as the Iraq War continued to spiral downhill, also led Praeger, which had printed many important books of the first counterinsurgency era during the Vietnam War (with the unacknowledged support of the CIA), to decide to reprint those classics. Praeger invited me to write a foreword to the book Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, written by the French counterinsurgent David Galula in 1963 but almost forgotten in the intervening forty years and long out of print. In fact, I had not read it during my doctoral work. I read it now and felt the same excitement I’d experienced when I met Dave Kilcullen. Here was a kindred spirit!

  Galula provided the most concise and precise imaginable description of how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign at the battalion level, drawing lessons from his own experience as a company commander and battalion operations officer in Algeria from 1958 to 1960. I wrote an enthusiastic endorsement of the book, noting in my first sentence that “the best writings on counterinsurgency share with the best sex manuals the fact that their authors tend to have some personal experience of their subject matter.”

  After a line editor’s objection to this sentence was overruled by the series editor, who fell out of his chair laughing, Praeger internally referred to the series of reprints of counterinsurgency books they were pushing out as “the sex manuals.” They included Roger Trinquier’s book Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency, with a foreword by Eliot Cohen; Napolean Valeriano an
d Charles Bohannan’s Counter-Guerilla Operations: The Philippine Experience, with a foreword by Gunner Sepp; and George Tanham’s Communist Revolutionary Warfare: From the Vietminh to the Viet Cong, with a foreword by Michael Sheehan, later the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. All of these books helped popularize the idea that there was a body of knowledge available on how to fight wars like Iraq; there was no need to make up ideas about how to conduct counterinsurgency out of whole cloth. As it turned out, David Galula’s ideas would play a particularly significant role in the learning process that was slowly gathering speed.

  General Petraeus (fourth from left) with Sosh Alumns in Baghdad, August 2004.

  Lieutenant General Petraeus had by now completed nearly eighteen months in Baghdad running the Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq, or MNSTC-I, pronounced “Min-sticky.” Wolf- owitz had fallen under then–Major General Petraeus’s spell during an early visit to Mosul after the initial invasion, and Petraeus had later recommended his deputy, Frank Helmick, to Wolfowitz as a suitable military assistant. I had visited General Petraeus in Baghdad before leaving Iraq in 2004, and he had repaid the favor, flying out to Khalidiyah to determine whether it was a suitable site for basing an Iraqi Army division. (It was, and he initiated construction of an Iraqi division base there.) Now Wolfowitz often spent an hour on Saturdays on the phone with Petraeus to get his views on the progress of Iraqi security forces, with Helmick and sometimes me listening in to take notes and render our assistance to the man in the arena.

  Petraeus returned to the States via Afghanistan, where he did an assessment for Secretary Rumsfeld, concluding that winning in Afghanistan would be harder and likely to take longer than the campaign in Iraq. He swung through the Pentagon en route to Fort Leavenworth in the fall of 2005. Petraeus had earlier infuriated Secretary Rumsfeld by appearing on the cover of Newsweek magazine under the title “Can This Man Save Iraq?” The article within suggested that the answer was probably yes, and the secretary of defense was not amused. Rumsfeld wanted to get Petraeus out of the newspapers and was leaning toward sending him to the traditionally Army-career-ending job of West Point superintendent when Sosh department chair Colonel Mike Meese intervened. Meese talked with the Secretary of the Army, suggesting the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth for Petraeus’s next assignment instead.

  Kansas was even farther from major media markets than was upstate New York, so Rumsfeld let it go, giving Petraeus control over the Army’s doctrine writing, branch schools, leader development, and training centers. It was a fateful choice. The Army was going to put its most experienced counterinsurgent in charge of what those at Leavenworth termed “the engine of change” for the Army. And the succinct guidance that General Schoomaker issued to General Petraeus was “Shake up the Army, Dave.”

  Though the secretary of defense had forbidden use of the word to describe the situation in Iraq, the Army, to its credit, knew that it was facing an insurgency there. It had recognized that it was not current on how to fight a counterinsurgency campaign soon after the statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square crashed to the ground courtesy of a Third Infantry Division M-88 armored recovery vehicle. In the fall of 2003, the doctrine center at Fort Leavenworth assigned an Army officer with no previous experience in counterinsurgency and without a combat tour in Iraq to rewrite its counterinsurgency doctrine. Under huge time constraints, he made a commendable effort, and FM(I) 3-22.1, Counterinsurgency, was published the day I arrived in the Pentagon from Iraq on November 1, 2004.

  The (I) stood for “Interim.” It was a new designation, acknowledging that the book was insufficient but declaring it was better than nothing, and it came with a promise that a reworked final version would be published within two years. I had met the author, Jan Horvath, at the Army War College conference at which Kilcullen and I had spoken, and I offered to help with the revision process but didn’t have any official role as he worked through a second draft. It had arrived just before Petraeus visited the Pentagon en route to take command of the Army doctrine center at Fort Leavenworth late in 2005.

  Pointing to the second draft of the interim counterinsurgency field manual on my desk, I told Petraeus that rewriting the manual—from scratch—was the first and most important thing he could do when he arrived in Leavenworth. I then provided a series of additional suggestions, including holding an open revision session on the rewritten manual to which key members of the defense press should be invited and hosting a counterinsurgency essay contest at Military Review, the publication for which he was responsible at Fort Leavenworth. Petraeus was noncommittal but took the proffered list of suggestions and promised to think about them. He was true to his word, ultimately implementing all my suggestions, some sooner than others.

  It was at about this time that the phone on my desk rang with a cold call from Sarah Sewall. Sarah had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford a few years before me, although we’d never met. She had served in the Pentagon as the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping, and a friend who had visited her in that role told me how surprised he was to be offered herbal tea when he visited her Pentagon office. He was further intrigued when she answered his questions sitting cross-legged on her sofa. Sarah was now director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University and planning a conference on counterinsurgency, to be held in Washington in November. Sarah invited me to speak at the conference on “Counterinsurgency in Iraq: Implications of Irregular Warfare for the U.S. Government,” and I was happy to accept.

  It pulled together many friends from the Army War College, Basin Harbor, and other counterinsurgency conferences, including Dave Kilcullen, T. X. Hammes, fellow former Sosh professor Rich Lacquement, and Gunner Sepp. I gave an updated version of my dissertation talk, focusing on the need to build an adaptive U.S. Army that could meet the demands of the counterinsurgency campaign it was still losing in Iraq, and I received polite applause. But the real work of the conference, as so often at these events, came between the formal presentations.

  Sarah knew Petraeus from her own time in the Pentagon and had invited him to provide a lunchtime keynote address at her conference. He spoke about lessons learned from his two tours in Iraq but made news only during the question and answer session after his talk. Responding to a question about how well the Army was doing at adapting to the demands of counterinsurgency in Iraq, he replied that it still had a long way to go—and that as a result I would be leading the effort to write a new counterinsurgency manual for the Army!

  This was news to me, but I wasn’t in the habit of telling Petraeus no and was frankly delighted at the tasking. After the conference ended, I gathered together a few friends at a local watering hole called the Front Page—former Sosh colleague Rich Lacquement, counterinsurgency theorists Erin Simpson and Janine Davidson, and fellow Al Anbar combat veteran Kyle Teamey, whom we had literally bumped into en route to the restaurant. Kyle was now out of the Army and taking classes at Johns Hopkins SAIS under Eliot Cohen’s mentorship. Over burgers and beers, on a convenient napkin, we outlined the counterinsurgency manual that I had just been tasked to produce. The napkin is now lost to the ages, but I transferred its contents to electronic format not long after the event. They looked something like this:

  1. Insurgency and Counterinsurgency

  2. Unity of Command

  3. Intelligence

  4. Operations

  5. Information Operations

  6. Host-Nation Security Forces

  7. Leadership and Ethics

  8. Logistics

  Already, at this early point, I wrote “annotated bibliography” on the napkin; it was important, I thought, for the Army to recognize that even the most comprehensive field manual couldn’t possibly cover everything that its soldiers needed to know about counterinsurgency and that there was a long history of armies adapting to this kind of war. A list of additional books for consideration would be a great way to send that message. The
re had never been an annotated bibliography in any Army field manual to that time, to my uncertain knowledge, but it seemed like a good time to start encouraging the Army to read more of its own history.

  The next morning, energized by the prospect of doing something a bit more directly connected to the conflict in Iraq than whispering in Secretary Wolfowitz’s ear after receiving briefings on progress reports, I reported to General Helmick. I let him know that Petraeus had asked me to take the lead on writing the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, probably by taking leave and being posted to Leavenworth myself, although we had not yet discussed the prosaic details. Although I wasn’t used to telling General Petraeus no, Frank Helmick had worked for him in combat and, more important for the current situation, was used to calling on the authority of his current boss to outrank people with more stars than Petraeus had on his shoulder. He had used just that authority to wrest me away from General Cody’s staff a year earlier, despite the fact that Cody had three more stars than he did. General Helmick picked up the phone and told Petraeus that, while I was certainly free to use my spare time between midnight and 0500 daily working for him, the deputy secretary of defense required my services from 0600 until 2000 daily and would not surrender me to a three-star, no matter how noble the task.