Knife Fights Page 13

  General Petraeus, unable to win a fight with Paul Wolfowitz and knowing that he had me in a backup role, decided to take Eliot Cohen’s advice and put Conrad Crane in the writer’s box. Con had been Petraeus’ West Point classmate back in 1974, had later earned his doctorate in history from Stanford, and was now retired from the Army and teaching at the Army War College. Crane’s prewar publication of a paper on “Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario” had proved prescient. Con had exactly the right skill-set to take lead on this mission and the perfect personality for it as well: low-key, self-effacing, quietly competent. With Con in the lead, I offered the outline we had scribbled out at the Front Page and a promise of help, including a suggestion that we get together at Leavenworth in early December at an information operations conference at which I would be speaking.

  Petraeus led off that conference in similar fashion to the talk he had given at Sarah’s get-together, going several hours over his allotted time. I gave my standard talk on learning counterinsurgency in Malaya and Vietnam. However, the conference was only an excuse to spend some time with Petraeus and Crane, so after my talk I slipped away with Con to the doctrine writers’ conference room, joining Jan Horvath for the task of starting over on the counterinsurgency field manual.

  Con came armed with a list of historical principles for success in counterinsurgency that drew heavily on Gunner Sepp’s Military Review article along with a new set of imperatives that he believed applied in the modern era. Most important, however, he had a list of paradoxes that played up the counterintuitive nature of counterinsurgency: the best weapons do not shoot bullets; the more force is used, the less effective it is; the best response is doing nothing; and most important, decisions are not made by generals. The paradoxes were delightfully seditious, designed to illustrate just how different counterinsurgency was from conventional warfare and how much adaptation was needed for conventional forces to be successful in the endeavor, and a number of reviewers later described them as “zen.” Although the elegance and simplicity of the initial paradoxes got watered down in the editing process by Petraeus, who thought them excessively confrontational to sacred Army shibboleths, these remained the most noted, and in many ways the most important, elements of the entire manual. Con was an effective insurgent against the machine, although he vetoed my plan for procuring conference coffee cups that featured the visage of Che Guevara—probably a good move in retrospect, although I protested volubly at the time.

  My contribution was the outline from the Front Page. We posted it on an easel and then talked about selecting good primary authors for each of the chapters. Con took the first, defining insurgency and counterinsurgency. I suggested Rich Lacquement for the second, on unity of effort, and Kyle Teamey for the third, on intelligence. I would take the fourth, on counterinsurgency operations, in conjunction with Jan Horvath. I pulled out my phone and started making calls. Rich and Kyle immediately agreed to have chapter drafts done by New Year’s, then just under four weeks away. It was a tight timeline, but we were constrained by Petraeus’s embrace of my idea of a vetting conference, now also including the Marine Corps after Petraeus talked to his battlefield comrade and my former Al Anbar boss General Jim Mattis. Petraeus had already set the dates for a mid-February gathering despite the fact that he hadn’t yet seen a completed sentence of the draft manual beyond my scribbled outline. We had promises to keep and people counting on us to come up with a way to win the war that was going even worse than it had been when I was fighting it directly.

  5.

  Clear, Hold, and Build

  The field manual review conference grew far larger than I had initially envisioned. The guest list ended up at more than one hundred people, including many of the most impressive talents from Basin Harbor and from Sarah Sewall’s conference. Sarah had agreed to cosponsor and cofund the draft review conference with Petraeus. The two of them sat together at the front of the room, while the bad kids (Janine Davidson, Dave Kilcullen, and I, along with New Yorker writer George Packer, who had written The Assassin’s Gate and would later write New Yorker profiles of both Kilcullen and H. R. McMaster) sat in the back. The inclusion of Packer was an indication of Petraeus’s media strategy. He invited several of the most thoughtful defense and foreign policy journalists, including The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Jaffe and the Atlantic Monthly’s Jim Fallows, to attend the conference in a background status; that is, they could use the information they gained at the conference in their later writings, but only if they didn’t identify either the speaker or the location. In short, Petraeus was pre-seeding what hopefully would be positive coverage of the manual among some of the nation’s most critical opinion leaders.

  Con Crane was the ringleader and head inquisitor, actively supported by Petraeus, who iron-butted through the entire affair, a considerable sign of his commitment to the project. Con began the conference by handing out small rocks to each participant before explaining that the innocent-looking stones were actually copralite—fossilized dinosaur dung. He challenged us to write a document that, unlike most army doctrine, would actually be useful and used—not dried-up antique excrement. Con then successively shepherded the chapter authors to the front of the room to present and defend their chapters.

  The chapters built nicely upon Con’s principles, imperatives, and paradoxes. Two themes came through all of them: first, that in a counterinsurgency campaign, the top priority is not to kill the enemy but to protect the population from enemy intimidation. This was a dramatic change from U.S. policy that flew in the face of Secretary Rumsfeld’s desires to continually reduce U.S. troop numbers. Protecting the population would require more troops, not fewer, although over time U.S. troops could be replaced by locally raised forces with American advisers to strengthen and assist them. But slow as it was, this was the best way to succeed in a counterinsurgency campaign; only the population could identify the insurgents in their midst, and they would do so only if they could be certain that they would survive the experience. This principle resounded through the history of previous counterinsurgency campaigns, and it was a strong pillar on which to build a manual.

  The other pillar was more original. It centered on the need to build adaptive learning organizations to succeed in counterinsurgency campaigns, which the manual described as competitions in learning. The side that learned and adapted faster was more likely to win. This concept received a major assist from the Marine team that Petraeus invited to join the writing campaign. Petraeus’s counterpart at Quantico was Lieutenant General Jim Mattis, the hard-bitten but intellectual Marine for whom I’d worked in Iraq once the corps took over Al Anbar from the 82nd Airborne Division. Mattis had a brilliant “designated thinker” named Frank Hoffman, a Penn graduate and retired Marine reserve lieutenant colonel who was a prolific writer and thinker on military matters and who had held up the Marines’ end of the discussion at Basin Harbor. Hoffman and General Mattis created the most intellectually innovative chapter of the field manual, the only one that I hadn’t outlined at the Front Page but in some ways the most important chapter in the book. Ultimately titled “Designing Counterinsurgency Campaigns and Operations” and printed as Chapter 4, it proposed a continuous process of learning and adaptation in counterinsurgency campaigns that recognized the need to build a learning organization to succeed in this kind of war.

  Iterative Counterinsurgency Campaign Design.

  The diagram is closely related to the one that I stole from Richard Downie’s dissertation on building a learning army and to one that Petraeus used describing his command at Fort Leavenworth as the Army’s “engine of change.” Both draw on the same requirement to understand the environment in which one is operating, and to delve deeper into the “black box” by which organizations come to a consensus that change is needed—that either doctrine itself or, in this case, a campaign plan for a particular counterinsurgency effort is no longer meeting requirements in the field and needs t
o be updated. The requirement to conduct continuous campaign assessments and change and adapt policies as additional information becomes available or as the situation on the ground changes has since become a part of Army doctrine more broadly and may end up being an even more important legacy of the counterinsurgency field manual than was the rediscovery of classic COIN principles it emphasized.

  The chapter that followed “Designing Counterinsurgency Campaigns and Operations” was, cleverly enough, “Executing Counterinsurgency Operations.” I had a hand in authoring this chapter, which drew heavily upon the work of David Galula. I was simultaneously writing the foreword for the new Praeger version of his masterpiece, Counterinsurgency Operations: Theory and Practice, and found Galula’s instructions incredibly helpful as I thought through how to conduct COIN operations. Galula had worked the principles of counterinsurgency out on the ground during a campaign in Algeria forty years before, but they rang absolutely true to my experience in Iraq.

  It took a long, long time for us to incorporate his instructions in the field. Simple lessons like “conduct a census of the population” and issue identification papers so that the occupying forces can tell friend from enemy, took years to implement, although in some ways we improved on Galula’s instructions by incorporating biometric identification measures that hadn’t existed during his time fighting in Algeria into the procedure we finally implemented across Iraq. These biometric techniques, along with other technological innovations, ultimately proved very useful in identifying insurgents more effectively and with less local input than had historically been possible.

  Galula’s influence is clear in the finished manual, and I would draw upon his work consistently while working on the drafts; in fact, a copy of his book was on my desk whenever I was writing, and I kept in mind his lament from Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice throughout the writing process: “If the individual members of the organization were of the same mind, if every organization worked according to a standard pattern, the problem would be solved. Is this not precisely what a coherent, well-understood, and accepted doctrine would tend to achieve?”

  In writing the “Executing Counterinsurgency Operations” chapter, we also relied upon a Military Review article by Major General Peter Chiarelli and Major Patrick Michaelis. General Chiarelli had come to the Pentagon in early 2005, upon his return from commanding the First Cavalry Division in Baghdad, and had given a talk on the Baghdad campaign that was an important step in my own learning process. Chiarelli, another Sosh veteran, described simultaneous counterinsurgency operations along a series of logical lines of operation in a slide that was later reprinted in Military Review and, still later, stolen lock, stock, and barrel and incorporated into the field manual. (The military doesn’t allow copyright for military authors in military journals, so it was fair game.)

  The brilliance of the diagram is in the recognition that most of the tasks required to succeed in a counterinsurgency campaign are not military and that all must be conducted simultaneously. David Galula had noted that counterinsurgency is only 20 percent military and 80 percent everything else—politics mostly, but also economics, development, and information operations. The Chiarelli/Michaelis diagram, which illustrated how they had thought about their mission to stabilize Baghdad over the course of 2004 and into 2005, lists only one exclusively military task (combat operations) and one mostly military task (train host nation security forces). Police training is actually a State Department responsibility according to U.S. law, although State has historically struggled with this task during combat situations and in Iraq most of the effective police training was done by the military, often military police units, or by contractors augmenting the MPs.

  The other tasks—providing essential services to the population, encouraging good governance, and supporting economic development, all wrapped up in a comprehensive information operations campaign—were not primarily military, although in a combat zone military forces might well be the only ones who could even attempt to complete them. The division of labor in the diagram explains why “Unity of Effort: Integrating Civilian and Military Activities” was the second chapter in the final field manual. The nonmilitary tasks in a counterinsurgency campaign become even more important than the military ones once the initial clearing of insurgents is complete, and the challenge of just understanding all the tasks, much less coordinating and prioritizing among them, is a big part of what makes counterinsurgency “the graduate level of war,” as the manual describes it. I would later see photocopies of the diagram everywhere I visited in Iraq in 2008.

  One of the great failures of the field manual was the decision not to include a chapter on information operations (IO). The Front Page napkin outline included a separate chapter on information operations, and the Chiarelli/Michaelis diagram highlights information operations as encompassing and larger than all other logical lines of operation (LLO). The manual itself says (in acronyms only a doctrine maven could love) that “the IO LLO may be the most important one.” Nonetheless, the final manual does not have a stand-alone chapter on information operations.

  The lack of clear guidance in the manual on IO is an indication not of the insignificance of the field but of its overriding importance. In the complicated interagency realm of conflicting and competing cabinet agencies, information operations is seen as outside the military realm, with responsibility for the task residing somewhere between the White House and the State Department. The Army and the Marines were certainly not going to tell State and the White House how to do IO in an Army/Marine Corps field manual—and so this most important line of operations muddled by with no one in charge and no instruction manual on how to accomplish it.

  During the Cold War, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) conducted effective information operations against the Soviet Union, although that war was primarily economic, secondly military, and only thirdly an information war. USIA was closed at the end of the Cold War as a budget savings measure. The war against radical Islamic extremism, on the other hand, is primarily a war of ideas, but we have no organization in charge of fighting that part of the fight. The national failure to rebuild the U.S. Information Agency, which did such good work during the Cold War but was a casualty of the peace dividend, has cost lives and treasure over a decade of war that would have been far better fought with someone in charge of information operations.

  This failing will outlast The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock, suggests that there have been just three revolutions in all of human history—the agricultural, the industrial, and the information revolutions. Each of these three revolutions has led to a profound impact on almost everything humans do, including how we wage war on each other. Agricultural-age warfare relied upon horseflesh and human muscle and reached its epitome under the leadership of Napoleon. Industrial-age warfare replaced animal muscle with the internal combustion engine and peaked in the Second World War; it took generations for agricultural-age generals to be replaced by those who understood this revolution in warfare, and the foot soldiers of the American Civil War and of the First World War paid the price in blood as their bosses struggled to understand the changing character of war. The information revolution changed warfare even more dramatically.

  The first information-age war was the American war in Vietnam. Army Colonel Harry Summers was the author of the modestly named book On Strategy that became the Army’s accepted version of why it lost in Vietnam. (Civilians had tied its hands behind its back, not allowing it to use firepower as widely and freely as it would have liked to.) In it, he tells the possibly apocryphal story of a discussion he had with a Vietnamese colonel at the Paris Peace Talks ending the war. Summers accosted the Vietnamese officer, telling him, “You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.” The Vietnamese colonel considered this for a moment before retorting, “That is true. It is also irrelevant.”

  The power of the information age had allowed the Vietcong and N
orth Vietnamese to defeat the United States without triumphing over its Army in the field, as had been required in all previous wars. Instead, the enemy went over the head of the Army to the American people, who decided that the war was no longer worth fighting. If a great power loses a small war, it does so for only one reason: because the national population loses the will to continue.

  The full implications of the information revolution on warfare remain to be seen; proponents of the revolution in military affairs believed that information dominance would allow the United States to triumph bloodlessly (or at least without spilling American blood) in conflicts around the globe. They were wrong. In fact, the information revolution empowered the enemies of the United States to disseminate violent ideologies and recruit jihadis far more effectively than they could have in an earlier day, but locating these same insurgents continued to rely at least in part on personal knowledge that only close association with the population could provide.

  Despite its failure to engage more directly with the requirements for success in information-age warfare, the field manual was a huge step forward, and the vetting conference an enormous success. James Fallows, of The Atlantic Monthly, offered the opinion at the end of the two days that he had never seen such an open exchange of ideas in any institution—government or private sector—and that the country would be the better for more such exchanges.

  After the conclusion of the conference in February 2006, we optimistically estimated that publication of the field manual was still some months away. To get the ideas from the conference into the Army as soon as possible, Eliot Cohen, Con Crane, Jan Horvath, and I put together an article for Military Review titled “The Principles, Imperatives, and Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency” that drew heavily upon the first chapter of the draft manual. It was published in the next issue after the conference, in the March–April 2006 issue of the journal that (with Petraeus as “publisher”) more than any other was the outlet for those who wanted to change the way the war in Iraq was being fought.