Knife Fights Read online

  The meat of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual is its middle chapters, which cover sociocultural intelligence, campaign design using that information to determine problem sets, and then execution along logical lines of operation to achieve solutions. Perhaps the most important influence of Counterinsurgency Field Manual on American doctrine has been through the concept of design, a contribution from the Marines that has become a part of all subsequent doctrine. Campaign design compels commanders to apply different combinations of information activities and combat operations, along with efforts aimed at improving governance and the economy, all in pursuit of a locally defined legitimacy that will sustain popular support. This complex and iterative plan must be conducted in concert with many partners, both from the host nation and internationally. While many of those partners have not yet developed the same degree of proficiency that the Army and Marines have displayed in recent operations in Afghanistan, efforts to increase civilian counterinsurgency capacity continue.

  The process of campaign design allows U.S. forces to continually adapt to the demands of the neighborhood they are fighting in, determining the appropriate balance between killing the enemy and protecting the population on each block and at each moment. At times the priority will be on combat operations, as it is currently in Navy operations against pirates in Somalia. At other times and in other places, the focus will be on training host-nation security forces, as it is in campaigns led by U.S. Special Forces in Yemen and Pakistan. But the essence of success, and one of the two major pillars of the manual, was in being adaptive to changing circumstances in the theater of war.

  That need was urgent in Iraq; in fact, all the dials were screaming red. On February 22, the first day of the Leavenworth field manual review conference, Al Qaeda in Iraq destroyed the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra. The bombing collapsed the Golden Dome of one of the holiest Shia shrines, in a move expressly designed by AQI to accelerate the civil war in Iraq. For the Shia, it was the final straw. Recognizing the strategic importance of the attack, Dave Kilcullen immediately left the conference to get to Iraq.

  The war had changed by now, from one in which Sunni revisionists upset with their loss of status and power targeted primarily U.S. forces, to one in which they also launched their car bombs and suicide bombers against increasingly Shia-dominated Iraqi security forces. The Shia had been remarkably tolerant of these attacks, but after the bombing of the Al Askari Mosque, the gloves came off. The Iraqi Army and Police, and the increasingly active Shia militia, engaged in all-but-open warfare against Sunni men, especially in Baghdad. The dark days of the Saddam Hussein era returned as the tortured bodies of young Sunni men were discovered every morning on the streets, many showing signs of torture administered by power drill. Sunni men began to get their home phone numbers tattooed on their thighs in the hope that when their bodies were discovered on the streets, someone would call their mothers to recover them. The Sunnis responded to the assassination campaign with more car bombs and improvised explosive devices, and the security situation deteriorated rapidly over the course of 2006 as we were tabulating revisions to the field manual from the conference.

  The American commander in Iraq, General George Casey, was not oblivious to climbing Iraqi civilian fatality totals, but he was slow to understand that the nature of the war had changed from a Sunni insurgency directed primarily at U.S. forces to a full-scale civil war. General Casey had been dealt a hard hand after arriving in Iraq in 2004 to take command from the overmatched Lieutenant General Sanchez. Casey had never before seen combat and, like the rest of the U.S. Army, had not been trained or educated in counterinsurgency. Armed only with the understanding of the subject he had gained from a weekend reading of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, General Casey was nonetheless capable of recognizing that he needed a counterinsurgency campaign plan, something his predecessor had not put together during his own year in command. In fact, it was during the writing and revision of this campaign plan that Casey had tasked Gunner Sepp to put together the list of best and worst practices for counterinsurgency that had led to his Military Review article and subsequent invitation to Basin Harbor. Casey had also noted the British decision to establish a counterinsurgency academy during the Malayan Emergency and set up one of his own at Taji in November 2005, after about a year of being unimpressed with the counterinsurgency readiness of the forces he was receiving from the Army.

  But for all the disasters he had inherited—Casey was known to mutter “George Bush has given me a pile of shit” under his breath—and all the good things he did to improve his position, Casey suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation in Iraq that his boss, CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid, had inflicted on him. Abizaid, an Arabic-speaking infantry officer, had been stationed in the Middle East in 1983 when the Beirut bombing left a Marine barracks in ruins and 241 American service members dead. Abizaid was scarred by the experience, convinced that American troops evinced such antibodies in the Middle East that even if they had been sent for positive missions like peacekeeping, they would inspire more violence than they tamped down. The lesson was imprinted in Casey’s mind through repeated interactions with General Abizaid, and over the course of 2006, even as the dynamics of conflict changed and casualty rates in Baghdad skyrocketed, Casey continued to press the case for continued U.S. troop reductions.

  The issue had been around at least since March 2005. Casey’s strategy of focusing on shifting responsibility to the Iraqis inspired reservations in President Bush, who accused his commander of playing for a tie.1 Casey was furious, but the president was right; his commander had no theory of victory, and no plan for how to reduce violence in Iraq to a level that could be handled by the Iraqis themselves. His focus was on turning over responsibility to the Iraqis as soon as possible, almost regardless of the consequences for the country.

  Fortunately, other Army officers had a different view. H. R. McMaster was an armor officer who had earned the Silver Star in Desert Storm for destroying an entire Iraqi battalion with his cavalry troop in a few minutes at the Battle of 73 Easting; he had later earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina for a scathing indictment of the leadership of the U.S. military in Vietnam, published as Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. H. R. was now commanding the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar, where he applied the classic counterinsurgency techniques of isolating a piece of terrain, separating the insurgents from the population, and then holding the cleared terrain with a combination of his own forces and locally raised ones. We used the Third ACR’s work at Tal Afar to illustrate the classic technique of “clear, hold, and build” in the fifth chapter of the field manual, and President Bush praised the technique in a nationally televised speech.

  However, even earning the praise of the president of the United States wasn’t enough to get H. R. promoted to brigadier general. H. R. had a way of telling the emperor that he had no clothes that rubbed many in the Army the wrong way, and a promotion board that was about to meet was likely to pass him over for the third time. That decision would have ended his career as a colonel despite H. R.’s extraordinary performance in two very different wars and his service as an academic thinker and innovator. H. R. was a hero not just to the president but also to many young officers who believed in his visionary leadership; if the Army failed to promote H. R., what hope did any of them have to make a difference in such a hidebound organization?

  Paul Yingling and I published an article in Armed Forces Journal in October 2006, just as the field manual was going to final edits, titled “New Rules for New Enemies.” The article drew heavily on the thinking I had been doing about the field manual and that Paul had done while working as H. R.’s deputy in Tal Afar. It presented a long list of recommendations for change in the Army but featured a plea based on our respect for McMaster and our belief that the Army would pass him over for promotion yet again.

/>   “To win the Long War, the Army must develop a more adaptive organizational culture. To create such a culture, the Army must change its centralized, specialized focus on major conventional wars to a more decentralized and less specialized focus on full-spectrum operations. This shift in organizational culture cannot occur within existing organizations—indeed, these organizations can be an impediment to change. The best way to change the organizational culture of the Army is to change the pathways for professional advancement within the officer corps. The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion.”2

  Fred Kaplan later described me during this period as “wandering the halls of the Pentagon with a gaunt, hungry look on my face, desperately looking for someone to talk with about counterinsurgency.” One of the few who were interested was Pete Geren. The former congressman, now a special assistant to Secretary Rumsfeld in the Pentagon, had procured an expensive hardcover copy of Soup after reading The New York Times Magazine’s depiction of “Professor Nagl’s War.” He later introduced himself to me at my desk in Secretary Wolfowitz’s office. Geren was deeply concerned about the course of the war in Iraq, the casualties that we were suffering, and the general lack of understanding of what it was we were trying to accomplish and how. We grabbed lunch together several times in his office, more frequently once he became undersecretary of the Army. I hit Geren hard on two points: the need to promote adaptive Army leaders like H. R. McMaster, and the need to develop wheeled armored vehicles with V-shaped hulls that deflected IED blasts rather than flat-bottomed hulls that absorbed the impact and had cost us so many lives and limbs in Al Anbar. Geren listened politely, more politely than my enthusiasm probably deserved, although what I said went in. Unfortunately, fixing these problems had to wait until he was promoted to secretary of the Army by a new secretary of defense.

  One of the arguments I often made to Geren and to anyone else who would listen was that the “sweep and clear” strategy that was being used by American units in Iraq was ineffective; the insurgents would return as soon as the American forces left, or would just lie low during our visits to their sector. I called it “clear and leave” and described the process as akin to mowing the lawn, because the terrain would have to be cleared again in the near future. This was one of many lessons that should have been learned from Vietnam but had been forgotten on purpose in the years after that war.

  I was driving from the Pentagon to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to give my “Learning Counterinsurgency in Iraq” talk at the Army War College on October 19, 2005, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She spoke of the need for a new approach in Iraq: “Our strategy has to be to clear, hold, and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable Iraqi institutions.” My eyes filled with tears, and I had to pull over to the side of the road for a minute to get control of myself. The word on how to conduct counterinsurgency was finally getting through to someone close to the top. I later learned that the method of transmission was via H. R. McMaster and Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, who traveled with Secretary Rice in his new position as assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Secretary Rumsfeld, of course, was apoplectic that a new strategy for Iraq was being briefed by the secretary of state, and sadly Secretary Rice’s correct prescription for a better counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq was ignored in Baghdad and the Pentagon.

  Our little band of insurgents inside the Pentagon was able to accomplish some good during the reign of Secretary Rumsfeld. The Defense Science Board, run by a small, brilliant man named Craig Fields, had focused its annual summer study on “Transition to and from Hostilities” in 2004. The report got mired in the bureaucratic muck of the Pentagon, but Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) for Stability Operations Jeb Nadaner refused to let it die. Nadaner was the successor in that office to Sarah Sewall several removed, although she had been called the DASD for “peacekeeping” under President Clinton. A deputy assistant secretary of defense is technically a three-star equivalent, but the real power of DASDs lies in their relationships with other political appointees—and with their military assistants. Jeb had invited me to speak to his directorate early in my Pentagon tenure. His subordinates included my old friend from Sosh Colonel Rich Lacquement, as well as civilians Vikram Singh, Colin Kahl, and Janine Davidson; all three of them would become DASDs themselves in President Obama’s Pentagon, while Rich retired from the Army to become the dean of the Army War College. Jeb worked hard to turn the conclusions of the Defense Science Board study into something the Pentagon could get its arms around. The result was Department of Defense Directive 3000.05, signed by Gordon England on November 28, 2005. It stated:

  Stability operations are a core US military mission that the Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct and support. They shall be given priority comparable to combat operations and be explicitly addressed and integrated across all DoD activities including doctrine, organization, training, education, exercises, material, leadership, personnel, facilities, and planning. [Italics mine]

  This was a huge change from the attitude in the Pentagon prior to the invasion of Iraq, which had all but forbidden the very activities that DoD 3000.05 now put on an equal footing with planning for, training in, and conduct of combat operations. But important as the words were, they would not be implemented by the man who was serving as the secretary of defense at the time the directive was signed.

  My doctoral dissertation had centered on the importance of an individual leader at the top of the organization who recognized the need for organizational change, encouraged subordinates to innovate, and then drove the rest of the organization to adopt the best practices that had been identified. General Sir Gerald Templer had been such a change agent in Malaya, while William Westmoreland had stymied many innovations that showed great promise in Vietnam. By the time Creighton Abrams replaced Westmoreland, the American people had lost faith in the effort, and the changes Abrams was able to implement were too little, too late.

  Even General Westmoreland, however, who has recently been labeled “The General Who Lost the Vietnam War” by former Army officer Bob Sorley, did not exert as pernicious an effect on organizational innovation during the Vietnam War as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did during the war in Iraq. From his initial insistence on reducing the number of troops involved in the invasion well below the number that would be required to secure Iraq once the Saddam Hussein regime had crumbled, to his requirement that his Department of Defense rather than the Department of State be tasked to oversee postconflict operations followed by a complete failure to prepare to assume those responsibilities, Rumsfeld’s role in the planning and preparation for the Iraq War was spectacularly bad. These mistakes were closely followed by his acceptance of Paul Bremer’s decrees to disband the Iraqi Army, radically de-Ba’athify Iraq, and prohibit local elections; Bremer reported to Rumsfeld, and the secretary was therefore responsible for the decisions that created and inflamed the insurgency in Iraq.

  Frustration with the war in Iraq and with the leadership of Secretary Rumsfeld peaked in the summer of 2006 with the publication of articles like Marine Lieutenant General Greg Newbold’s “Why Iraq Was a Mistake” in Time magazine; the secretary’s stubborn insistence that we weren’t fighting an insurgency and refusal to send more troops to improve security or build a bigger Army and Marine Corps to relieve the strain on the force had boiled over.

  But as Paul Yingling and I were discussing, it wasn’t just the SECDEF whose performance was lacking; the Army’s general officer corps had failed to prepare the Army for the war it was actually going to have to fight, and it had failed to rapidly adapt when the conventional Army they had built was required to conduct counterinsurgency. Our conversations often resulted in magazine articles, and this one was no different, but it was even more controversial than our previous writings had been. I tried to persuade Paul to publish thi
s one anonymously, or under the pseudonyms “Willie and Joe,” a reference to Bill Mauldin’s iconic World War II soldiers, but he (probably correctly) pointed out that it wouldn’t be hard to figure out that it was really the two of us who had written it.

  In a decision that still troubles me, I reluctantly took my name off of the piece to preserve my limited Army career prospects, and Paul courageously published “A Failure in Generalship” as the cover story of the April 2007 Armed Forces Journal. The article was a collaboration between the two of us, as had been all the previous articles Paul had published; this was the first to have only his byline. I had written the part of the article comparing the performance of American generals in Iraq with those who had served in Vietnam, and suggested calling on Congress to use its power to promote and prematurely retire general officers to reward good performance and punish failure; Paul’s original idea for a solution, creating an American version of the German General Staff, was unlikely enough to have reduced the credibility of the article as a whole.

  Lieutenant General Greg Newbold and Major General Robert Scales, February 19, 2008.

  The article’s best line was Paul’s alone: “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” Paul found out that a lieutenant colonel who signs an article critical of the performance of generals in combat also suffers greater consequences than a general who loses a war; he still took command of an artillery battalion shortly after the article was published only because of a phone call to the Army by House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton, warning the Army that it had better allow him to take command of his artillery battalion as scheduled. However, Paul was not selected to accompany his battalion to Iraq, a decision that was overturned only after intervention by General Petraeus, and he was promoted to full colonel only after intervention by General Chiarelli, then the vice chief of staff of the Army.