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Summary
Summary
THE INSURGENTS unfolds against the backdrop of two wars waged against insurgencies-- wars which the Pentagon's top generals didn't know how to fight. But a small group of soldiers and scholars did have a plan for fighting these kinds of wars, people like General David Petraeus and Colonels John Nagl, David Kilcullen, and H.R. McMaster. In order to push the idea of "counterinsurgency" warfare, they behaved like insurgents within their own army-and very self-consciously so. Fred Kaplan explains where this idea came from, and how the men and women who latched onto this idea created a community (some would refer to themselves as a "cabal") that maneuvered the idea through the highest echelons of power.
But this is also a cautionary tale about how even creative ideas can harden into dogma, how smart strategists-the "best and the brightest" of our times-can sometimes sway politicians but don't always win wars. The Insurgents made their military more adaptive to the conflicts of the post-Cold War era, but their self-confidence led us deeper into wars that we shouldn't have been fighting and perhaps couldn't have been won.
Author Notes
Fred Kaplan teaches at Queens College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. He is the editor of The Essential Gore Vidal and the author of the biographies Henry James, Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Kaplan lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Despite advances in military technology, American military strategy had failed to keep pace with the realities of modern warfare and its aftermath. General David Petraeus and others recognized an immediate need for new tactics to combat insurgencies like those rising in the Middle East and, drawing on concepts that often had little to do with weaponry, they developed a more thoughtful and integrated approach. Here, Kaplan (The Wizards of Armageddon) charts the evolution of this new philosophy, drawing from personal interviews, meeting notes, and a litany of sources to provide an illuminating and frequently infuriating examination of how the US views warfare. Measured and meticulous, Kaplan's account is informative, detail-laden, and tempered by sharp analysis. Those hoping for insight into Petraeus's fall from grace and subsequent resignation will likely end up disappointed; it's addressed in a postscript but not given much time. However, for readers interested in military history, strategy, as well as the inner machinations of military politics will find a lot to chew on in this lengthy study. 16p b&w insert. (Jan) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Finished before the November 2012 resignation of CIA director David Petraeus, Kaplan's study contains a curiosity: a footnote cites All In, by Paula Broadwell (2011), a biography of Petraeus by his notorious femme fatale, to the effect that Petraeus was denied the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and given the CIA instead. Why? Stay tuned while we review Kaplan's account of a coterie of army officers who campaigned to raise the importance of counterinsurgency in American military doctrine. This grouping, which included Petraeus, shared an intellectual perspective on warfare and ascended in influence as the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan descended into protracted, irregular combat. What Kaplan offers is a highly detailed episode in the Pentagon's bureaucratic politics, which pitted the counterinsurgency-minded officers against brass more mentally comfortable with conventional warfare and which were conducted through conferences, promotions, and annunciation of doctrine. Petraeus' internecine victory, the publication of Counterinsurgency:FM 3-24 (2007), peaks Kaplan's narrative, which then elides into that field manual's application to Iraq and Afghanistan. Intensively researched and factually presented, this work most suits mavens of military affairs. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Newsworthiness instantly expands Kaplan's intended audience; many of the figures interviewed here might, as Washington's investigatory machine gears up, be seen again soon.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The American occupation of Iraq in its early years was a swamp of incompetence and self-delusion. The tales of hubris and reality-denial have already passed into folklore. Recent college graduates were tasked with rigging up a Western-style government. Some renegade military units blasted away at what they called "anti-Iraq Forces," spurring an inchoate insurgency. Early on, Washington hailed the mess a glorious "mission accomplished." Meanwhile, a "forgotten war" simmered to the east in Afghanistan. By the low standards of the time, common sense passed for great wisdom. Any American military officer willing to criticize his own tactics and question the viability of the mission brought a welcome breath of fresh air. Most alarming was the atmosphere of intellectual dishonesty that swirled through highest levels of America's war on terror. The Pentagon banned American officers from using the word "insurgency" to described the nationalist Iraqis who were killing them. The White House decided that if it refused to plan for an occupation, somehow the United States would slide off the hook for running Iraq. Ideas mattered, and many of the most egregious foul-ups of the era stemmed from abstract theories mindlessly applied to the real world. There is no one better equipped to tell the story of those ideas - and their often hair-raising consequences - than Fred Kaplan, a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter. Kaplan writes Slate's War Stories column, a must-read in security circles. He brings genuine expertise to his fine storytelling, with a doctorate from M.I.T., a government career in defense policy in the 1970s and three decades as a journalist. Kaplan knows the military world inside and out; better still, he has historical perspective. With "The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War," he has written an authoritative, gripping and somewhat terrifying account of how the American military approached two major wars in the combustible Islamic world. He tells how it was grudgingly forced to adapt; how it then overreached; and how it now appears determined to discard as much as possible of it learned and revert to its old ways. "The Insurgents" proceeds like a whodunit starring a fringe community of officers who resisted the military's post-Vietnam embrace of mediocrity. It's breathtaking to realize just how hide-bound and doctrinaire the Pentagon had become in the decades before 9/11. Though the cold war had ended, most top generals still believed the military should be training to block Soviet tanks at the Fulda Gap. Even while American "advisers" fought in minor shooting wars all over the globe, the brass officially denied these were genuine combat missions, calling them first "low intensity conflicts" and then, even more laughably and misleadingly, "operations other than war." Kaplan explains how officers bent on preserving their careers and avoiding "another Vietnam" happily parroted nonsense to climb the ladder. Insurgencies and occupations were not a Pentagon priority; anyone who prepared for them was committing career hara-kiri. All along, however, a small fraternity of independent thinkers nurtured a running critique of the way America conceived of, and actually fought, war. Though few in number, they were sprinkled throughout the Pentagon bureaucracy, the military ranks and the world of research institutions. This network grew into a powerful cabal, and Kaplan traces their work in meetings, military journals, commands and conflict zones over four decades. Their poster boy was David H. Petraeus, who distinguished himself by ambition, self-promotion and intellect. Eventually he almost single-handedly elevated counterinsurgency doctrine (known by its military acronym COIN) into a sort of gospel. For a brief period, COIN held sway in Washington. Today, it's easy to condemn its faddish and facile elements, accentuated by its smug advocates ("An Insurgent Within the COIN Revolution," one of them titled a PowerPoint presentation). But Kaplan reminds us just how bad things had gotten in military circles by the time the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld simply fired or ignored officers and advisers who pointed out facts that didn't fit his conclusions. Men like Petraeus were dismissed as bookish nerds. Officers who criticized the orthodoxy, like Andrew Krepinevich Jr., were hounded out of the service, or, like H. R. McMaster, watched their careers stall. They are the heroes of Kaplan's book, although ultimately he gives them mixed reviews. They fell in thrall to their own gumption, he says, and as they rose to power they became complacent - especially Petraeus. "In part from overconfidence, in part from inertia," he started to see his counterinsurgency doctrine "as a set of universal principles," Kaplan writes. Still, how the COIN insurgents took over United States security policy makes for thrilling reading. These officers were assiduous climbers, and it is riveting to watch them swing from the battlefield, where they practiced neat COIN tricks like bribing militias and walling off neighborhoods by sect, to the Pentagon, where they engaged in conference-room jujitsu and water-cooler back-stabbing. For students of war, there's lots to learn about why the occupation of Iraq went badly and then better, and why America's designs to remake Afghanistan were never realistic. For everyone, there's a fascinating history of how true belief and dogged commitment can infect a resistant bureaucracy and grudgingly extract change. The savvy Petraeus invited journalists everywhere, spawning the best kind of free publicity: profile after profile that portrayed him in heroic terms as a scholar-soldier always receptive to hard truths and willing to engage in self-criticism. He knew how to manage up, cultivating powerful Pentagon patrons and winning President Bush's favor with a misleading op-ed in The Washington Post just before the 2004 election that touted what he claimed were a series of achievements in Iraq. He invited outside experts who agreed with him to advise him. When they thought he was acting on their ideas, they became passionate advocates. He ghost-wrote articles, and then quoted them under his own byline. Kaplan relates how Petraeus, assigned in 2005 to run Fort Leavenworth, including its doctrine division, radically rewrote antiquated training manuals. A panicked staff member told him he was violating Army regulations that limited his changes to 10 percent; Petraeus demanded to see the rule, which, it turned out, didn't exist. It was a military myth. The anecdote exemplifies both the military's aversion to change and Petraeus's style of forcing it. BY the time he was appointed the top commander in Iraq in 2007, Petraeus had learned from his earlier mistakes as the head of the mission to train Iraq's security forces. Mosul, the city that he had successfully pacified for a year at the beginning of the war, had fallen apart; his improvised tactics had done some good, but couldn't survive transition to a new commander. Petraeus had churned out hundreds of thousands of hastily trained but well-armed police officers and soldiers, following orders to stand up indigenous forces of any quality so that America could stand aside. Once the Iraqi civil war heated up, these sloppily mustered forces deserted, defected or joined death squads. But now that he was in charge, he adopted as his strategy the Army field manual he had just written, and surrounded himself with old friends and mentees. Petraeus and his merry band changed tactics, mobilizing a counterinsurgency network to pursue extremists with force, but spending most of their resources protecting Iraqi civilians from carnage. Petraeus got extra troops. And he benefited from significant developments completely beyond his control: Sunni tribes broke with Al Qaeda in Iraq, while the most formidable Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, declared a unilateral cease-fire so its leader could purge rogue units. President Bush had promoted the COINdinistas because they were flexible, pragmatic problem solvers and because he had a nagging problem on his hands: how to get out of Iraq without looking defeated. Counterinsurgency was just one part of the fortuitous mix that yielded a just-good-enough resolution for Iraq. Petraeus and the officers and experts had been right about how to fight in Iraq and reached plum positions in the Pentagon. But they overestimated themselves. They fancied they were inventing a new way of war and casting out the demons of a moribund Pentagon. In fact, they were doing something far less grandiose. After President Obama took office, he adopted counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan, and made Petraeus the commander in that war. Yet by then, as Kaplan persuasively argues, counterinsurgency doctrine had calcified into dogma. COIN was just one tool in a great power's kit, not a one-size-fits-all solution, and in Afghanistan it made no sense at all. A counterinsurgency requires a long commitment, 10 years or more, and great numbers of troops, but the United States intended to pull out after a quick, small surge. Moreover, the Afghan government shared almost none of America's goals, making the war's mission untenable. Kaplan damningly portrays a group of military officers and outside experts who cynically recommended a troop surge and a switch to counterinsurgency tactics in Afghanistan even though, he claims, they were skeptical that any strategy could actually stabilize the country. A formulaic Petraeus rambled on about his glory days in Iraq, even during meetings with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, drawing warnings from his no-longer-fawning subordinates. He left with an aura of failure, and Obama, having been boxed in by his generals to escalate in Afghanistan, ultimately outmaneuvered them, calling their bluff and ordering a drawdown. The lesson of the COINdinistas' subversive struggle in the bureaucracy and their brief heyday was that you can't want victory more than the foreign government you're trying to prop up. Kaplan's narrative ends before the news of Petraeus's embarrassing and career-halting extramarital affair, but the denouement of "The Insurgents" is sadder and certainly far more consequential. The COIN brigade forced the Army to adapt, to become what one officer called "a learning organization," but the Pentagon failed to grasp the most important lesson of the decade: that the military does best when it can learn new types of missions quickly, whether delivering aid after a tsunami, stabilizing a failed state or running covert missions against international terrorist rings. Instead, it exchanged an old dogma for a new one. Once persuaded that the military could do counterinsurgency, few in Washington stopped to think about when it should do it "Petraeus had stressed the importance of getting 'the big ideas' right, but the ideas in COIN theory weren't as big as he seemed to believe," Kaplan writes. Obama has ordered the Pentagon to preserve the lessons of counterinsurgency and stability operations in case they're needed in the future, but Kaplan reports that the president has also ordered that minimal manpower or matériel go toward preparing for resource-draining exercises in counterinsurgency and nation-building. The counterinsurgency cult was more than a fad, Kaplan establishes. But it was much less than a revolution. Almost singlehandedly, David Petraeus elevated counterinsurgency doctrine into a sort of gospel. Thanassis Cambanis is a fellow at the Century Foundation. His next book portrays Egypt's revolutionaries after the fall of Mubarak. Thanassis Cambanis reviews "The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War," by Fred Kaplan, who explores the challenges to, and changes in, American military policy during the ocuupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kirkus Review
How a group of farsighted Army officers gradually forced competence in fighting insurgents upon a hostile military establishment. When David Petraeus graduated from West Point in 1974, there were no courses on counterinsurgency. The generals were only interested in training for the next real war, by which they meant tank battles on the plains of Europe. The collapse of the world's third-largest tank army in Desert Storm persuaded some young officers that such a war would never happen. American forces would instead fight small wars against insurgencies--a word that was taboo in the Pentagon for years--and it would be necessary to study and train for these wars if the Army was to conduct them successfully. Pulitzer Prize winner Kaplan (1959: The Year Everything Changed, 2010, etc.) describes how a cadre of officers, of whom Petraeus was only the most prominent, risked reputations and careers to struggle to overturn the Army's institutional aversion to counterinsurgency. These "insurgents," as they thought of themselves, assembled doctrines and procedures for fighting such wars from long-ignored, nearly forgotten texts, white papers and dissertations, then field-tested them with considerable success when they were urgently needed in Iraq. Kaplan describes the networking and bureaucratic maneuvering involved as the participants read each other's papers, met at conferences and began appointing each other to influential positions until they succeeded in establishing counterinsurgency as a centerpiece of American military strategy. Along the way, the author incisively examines some of the inherent shortcomings of counterinsurgency doctrine, explaining why it is difficult for Americans to support this approach and why it was more likely to succeed in Iraq than in Afghanistan, where the Obama administration is moving to a more conventional counterterrorism approach. A compelling story combined with thoughtful analysis of the development, application and limitations of a new model of applying American military power. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was completed prior to the news of the Petraeus scandal.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1. "What We Need Is an Officer with Three Heads" A few days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, John Nagl saw his future disappear. The first tremors came at dawn, on February 24, 1991, as he revved up the engine of his M-1 tank and plowed across the Saudi Arabian border into the flat, endless sands of southern Iraq. For the previous month, American warplanes had bombarded Saddam Hussein's military machine to the point of exhaustion. Now the ground-war phase of Operation Desert Storm--the largest armored offensive since the Second World War--roared forth in full force, pushing Iraq's occupying army out of Kuwait. Lieutenant Nagl was a platoon leader in the US Army's 1st Cavalry Division, which, on that morning, mounted the crucial feint along the route where Saddam's commanders were expecting an invasion. While Nagl and the rest of the 1st Cav pinned down the Iraqi troops with a barrage of bullets, shells, and missiles, the offensive's main force--a massive armada of American soldiers, nearly a quarter million strong, along with their armored vehicles, artillery rockets, and a fleet of gunship helicopters overhead--swept across the desert landscape from the west in a surprise left-hook assault, enveloping Saddam's troops and crushing them into submission after a mere one hundred hours of astonishingly lopsided fighting. Nagl had graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point two-and-a-half years earlier, near the top of his class, and then won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. Highly ranked cadets got their pick of Army assignments, and Nagl chose the armor branch. Tanks would be the spearhead of the big war for which the Army was ceaselessly preparing--the titanic clash between the United States and the Soviet Union across the East-West German border--and so, tank commanders were prime candidates for fast promotion through the ranks. Nagl even studied German while at West Point and became fluent in the language, figuring that Germany was where he'd be spending the bulk of his career. Then, not quite a year before he deployed to the Gulf, the Berlin Wall fell, the two Germanys merged, the Cold War ended--and now, right before his eyes, the Iraqi army, the fourth-largest army in the world, was crumbling on contact. It was a moment of unaccustomed triumph for the US military, still haunted by the defeat in Vietnam. But to Nagl, it also signaled the end of the era that made the triumph possible. Tank-on-tank combat had been the defining mode of warfare for a modern superpower; now it teetered on the verge of obsolescence. The Soviet Union and Iraq had been the last two foes that possessed giant tank armies. With the former gone up in smoke and the latter crushed so easily on the battlefield, it seemed implausible that any foreign power would again dare challenge the United States in a head-on contest of strength. The premise of all Nagl's plans--to say nothing of the rationale for his beloved Army's doctrines, budgets, and weapons programs--seemed suddenly, alarmingly irrelevant. Nagl didn't think that any of this necessarily meant the coming of world peace. If "major combat operations" (the official name for big tank wars) were no longer likely, there was still plenty of room for minor ones, especially the "shadow wars" mounted along the peripheries of vital interests by insurgents, guerrillas, or terrorists. Nagl didn't know much about these kinds of wars. Neither did the Army. He hadn't learned about them as a cadet at West Point. Nor had he since read about them in Army field manuals or practiced fighting them in officers' training drills. There was a reason for this gap in his education. In the mid-1970s, after the debacle of Vietnam, the Army's top generals said "Never again" to the notion of fighting guerrillas in the jungle (or anyplace else). Instead, they turned their gaze once more to the prospect of a big war against the Soviet Union on the wide-open plains of Europe--a war that would play to America's traditional strengths of amassing men and metal--and they threw out the book (literally: they threw out the official manuals and curricula) on anything related to what were once called "irregular wars," "asymmetric wars," "low-intensity conflicts," or "counterinsurgency campaigns." To the extent that these types of wars were contemplated at all, the message went out that there was nothing distinctive about them. For decades, Army doctrine had held that wars were won by superior firepower . This idea was taken as gospel, whether the war was large or small, whether the enemy was a nation-state or a rogue guerrilla. As one adage put it, if you can lick the cat, you can lick the kitten. Or, in the words of another: war is war is war. But Nagl suspected that, like it or not, America might find itself drawn into fighting these "small wars" again; that if the Army had a future, these wars would play a key part in it; and (though he didn't grasp this idea at first) that these wars were different from large wars in ways other than mere size and, therefore, had to be fought in different ways by soldiers trained in different skills. Not long after Desert Storm, Nagl persuaded the Army to send him back to Oxford for graduate school, where he embarked on a historical study of these kinds of wars. The study evolved into a doctoral dissertation, which he published as a book, which he then hoisted as a weapon--an intellectual weapon--in a policy war back home. He sought and found a cadre of allies to fight this war with him: mainly fellow Army officers, along with a few marines and civilian defense analysts, who were reaching similar conclusions through their own experiences, and who, once they grew aware of one another's existence, formed a community--a "cabal" or "mafia," some frankly called it--dedicated to the cause of reviving counter-insurgency doctrine and making it a major strand, even the centerpiece, of American military strategy. To pull off this feat, they had to act like insurgents: subversive rebels within their own military establishment, armed not with weapons but with ideas and, in some cases, a mastery of bureaucratic maneuvering. Most of them fully grasped the irony, and the stakes, of what they were doing. One of these rebels would title a PowerPoint briefing about this community's emergence, and his role in it, "An Insurgent Within the COIN Revolution." Critics derided them as "COINdinistas," a wordplay that combined the abbreviation for counterinsurgency (COIN) with the name of the leftist insurgency that seized power in Nicaragua in the late 1970s (Sandinistas). The COIN rebels took to the name, invoking it with a self-aware smirk and a missionary pride. For it was a serious struggle they were waging: a campaign to overhaul the institutional culture of the US military establishment--the way it groomed new leaders, adapted to new settings, and adopted new ideas. A few years into the twenty-first century, a second American war in Iraq--this time an outright invasion for the purpose of "regime change"--triggered the rise of sectarian militias. Simultaneously, Islamist insurgents renewed a fight for power in Afghanistan. And the battle of ideas between the COINdinistas and the traditionalists took on an urgent intensity. The stakes were suddenly very high. It was no longer an esoteric quarrel over history and theory, but a struggle whose outcome meant life or death, victory or defeat--not only in those two wars but possibly in other theaters of conflict for years or decades to come. It was a battle for how the Pentagon does business and how America goes to war. At first the rebels would win the battle. A cultural upheaval would seize the military at its core. A new kind of officer would rise through the ranks. And the Army would shift from a static garrison establishment to a flexible fighting force, more adaptable to the dangers and conflicts of the post-Cold War era. Yet, as often happens with revolutions, the new doctrine, enshrined in the first flush of victory, would harden into dogma. And its enthusiasts, emboldened in their confidence, would--often with good intentions--lure the nation more deeply into another war that it lacked the ability or appetite to win. • • • The seeds of the COIN revolt first sprouted in the Army's own hothouse: the military academy at West Point, the gleaming granite fortress overlooking the Hudson River, fifty miles north of New York City, where cadets had been molded into officers since the early years of the republic. A reverence for tradition was carved into its foundations, piped into its air. West Point was where, in 1778, General George Washington built the Continental Army's most critical strategic fortress. It had remained an Army holding ever since--the oldest continuously occupied military post in North America. President Thomas Jefferson signed the bill establishing the United States Military Academy on West Point's land in 1802. Fifteen years later, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, one of the academy's early superintendents, issued its first curriculum and honor code, which survived so many otherwise tumultuous eras that one cadet, in the mid-twentieth century, scribbled out a proposed new motto: "Two Hundred Years of Tradition, Unhindered by Progress." Some on the faculty read it as a benediction, not a joke. The COIN rebellion was fomented by a subculture within the academy, composed of officers who venerated tradition but also embraced strands of progress. They saw themselves as apart from (some would say above ) the rest of West Point. They were the faculty and students of its Social Sciences Department, known to members and detractors alike as "Sosh." Sosh was the brainchild of George Arthur Lincoln, who graduated from West Point in 1929, ranking fourth in his class. There were no majors or even electives at the academy in those days; everyone took the same courses, most of them in engineering. (Throughout the nineteenth century, West Point alumni had played a leading role in constructing the nation's rail lines, bridges, harbors, and interstate roads.) Lincoln, nicknamed Abe by his friends, won a Rhodes Scholarship after graduating and spent the next three years at Oxford, studying philosophy, politics, and economics. It was a heady experience for the son of a farmer from Harbor Beach, Michigan, a small town on the shore of Lake Huron. Afterward, he came back to West Point to teach. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Lincoln was assigned to a high-level staff job in London, where he planned the logistics for the Normandy invasion. His talents were quickly recognized, and in the spring of 1943, he was ordered back to Washington to serve as deputy chief of the Strategy and Policy Group, the US Army's brain trust, located on the third floor of the Pentagon, next to the office of the chief of staff, General George Marshall. In the fall of 1944, at age thirty-seven, Lincoln was promoted to brigadier general--making him the Army's youngest general officer--and took over as the S&P Group's chief. He coordinated operations for every major military campaign in the war's final year and advised Marshall on a daily basis, accompanying him to the conferences at Yalta and Potsdam, where he had a hand in drafting the treaties that shaped the political map of postwar Europe. By the end of the war, Lincoln had earned enough plaudits to win whatever plum assignment a one-star general might want. He stayed on with the S&P Group for another year, helping Marshall's replacement, General Dwight Eisenhower, organize the newly created Department of Defense. But what he really wanted to do was to go back to West Point and start a new department that combined the study of history, government, international politics, and economics--a department of social sciences. While working with Marshall at the various Allied planning conferences, Lincoln had noticed that much of the crucial staff work was performed by just a handful of military officers and that nearly all of them had been, like him, Rhodes Scholars. He calculated that West Point had produced a total of thirteen Rhodes Scholars in its history. Of the six still alive, four were currently holding senior policy-making positions. Throughout the war, those four had planned several major military operations--crossing the English Channel and the Rhine, attacking the islands off Shanghai, arranging the surrenders of Germany and Japan--and now, in the war's unsettled aftermath, they were working out the terms of peace treaties, arms accords, and international boundaries. Emerging as a global power with global responsibilities, the United States would need leaders--or at least staff officers advising the leaders--who were well versed in politics, diplomacy, economics, and military strategy. But few such people existed, in or out of the military. West Point, Lincoln mused, was good at training mess officers and battalion commanders, and maybe that was enough for an earlier time. But the commanders and chiefs of the postwar American Army would have to be "very broad-gauged individuals," as he put it to one colleague. The problem was that by the time officers were promoted to such a high position, it was "a little late to start instilling the broad approach." Their education had to begin much sooner. On May 20, 1945, less than two weeks after the war in Europe ended, Lincoln wrote to Colonel Herman Beukema, one of his former mentors back at West Point: "I am beginning to think that what we need is a type of staff officer with at least three heads--one political, one economic, and one military." Over the next year, the two officers struck up a correspondence, pondering the role that West Point might play in breeding this new type of officer for a new Army in a new world. In one letter, Lincoln proposed "baptizing practically all officers" with a "sprinkling" of education in politics, history, and economics, while taking "certain selected" officers and "dunking" them in those waters much more deeply. Beukema agreed. The sorts of challenges that Lincoln had described confronting during the war made it clear, Beukema wrote, "that the Army can no longer afford to depend on the fortuitous assembly of Rhodes Scholars . . . There must be an integrated system of high-level training if Army policy and national policy are properly to be served, a system which begins here at West Point." And so was hatched the idea of starting the Department of Social Sciences. In August 1945, soon after Japan's surrender, West Point's superintendent announced that the academy would soon resume its four-year course of study, which had been suspended during the war while most of the cadets and instructors had gone off to fight. In June 1946, Congress passed a bill expanding the size of the academy's faculty. In July, Lincoln told Beukema that he might be interested in coming back to West Point. Beukema was sixteen years older than Lincoln, so he would be the Sosh department's first chairman, but Lincoln would be his deputy--for all practical purposes, running its operations--and formally succeed him when he retired. There was one hitch. By Army regulations, a department chair or deputy chair at West Point was to be filled by a colonel, not a general. But Lincoln thought this was the most important thing he could do, so he requested a demotion--an almost unheard-of move, which carried a cut in authority and pay. Lincoln started his new job on September 1, 1947. Another seven years would pass before Beukema retired and Lincoln rose to chairman; meanwhile, together they set about turning their vision into reality. Before Lincoln returned, West Point's curriculum had been very thin in the social sciences. It had offered several full-year courses in engineering, math, chemistry, physics, military tactics, even military bridges, but only a semester each in military history and political science, and only a half semester in economics. Lincoln and Beukema created courses in history, government, foreign affairs, geography, national-security economics, and international relations. (There were no college-level American textbooks on international politics, so Lincoln wrote one, which also wound up being assigned at several civilian colleges across the country.) From the beginning, there was something clearly different about the Sosh department. A few months before coming back to West Point, Lincoln had written to Beukema, "I am certain that we must make strenuous efforts . . . to improve the so-called Army mind." This would mean, above all, "impressing the student with the fact that the basic requirement is to learn to think--sometimes a very painful process." So, unlike most of the departments, where instructors recited hard facts in straight lectures, Sosh courses were taught more like seminars, allowing, even encouraging, questions, discussion, to some degree dissent. There was no major in Social Sciences just yet; there were no majors of any sort. (They wouldn't come to West Point until the reforms of the mid-1980s.) All cadets took the same core courses. But a few of the core courses were now Sosh courses, and cadets could sign up for a handful of electives. Those who took Sosh electives felt a sense of separate space for critical inquiry, more like what students at a liberal-arts college were experiencing. It was something that cadets and faculty in other departments at West Point viewed with a little distrust, resentment, envy, or all three. The act of asking questions and talking back was itself a cause for suspicion in the Army, an institution that, by nature, demanded obedience to authority, especially in a time when American society and culture rewarded conformity. Sosh students and faculty were commonly derided as "communists," sometimes in jest, sometimes not. As late as 1991, when General Norman Schwarzkopf, the hero-commander of Operation Desert Storm, came back to West Point to deliver a rousing victory speech, he reminisced about his own days as a cadet and, at one point, poked fun at the crazy ideas advanced by "a couple of left-wing pinko Social Science instructors." He was joking, sort of, but the laughter and applause from the audience reflected at least a lingering trace of the stereotype. In a move that only intensified this sense of an elite enclave, Lincoln established a rule allowing cadets who did especially well in Sosh courses to go study at a civilian graduate school, with West Point paying the tuition. In exchange, these cadets, after earning their doctorate degrees, would come back and teach in the Sosh department for at least three years. Once they fulfilled that obligation, Lincoln would use his still-considerable connections in Washington to get them choice assignments in the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, a foreign embassy, or a prestigious command post. The idea of all this was to boost the quality of education at West Point, to create an esprit de corps within the Sosh department in particular, and, from that, to cultivate an elite within the Army's officer corps, the new type of officer that Lincoln envisioned in his letter to Beukema just after the war: the "staff officer with at least three heads," instilled with a knowledge of political, economic, and military matters, at a level of breadth and depth that the nation would demand of its top officers in an age of global reach and rivalry. Lincoln would later articulate a philosophy of personnel policy: "Pick good people, pick them young before other pickers get into the competition, help them to grow, keep in touch, exploit excellence." Over the years, a network of Lincoln's acolytes--and the acolytes of those acolytes--emerged and expanded. They called themselves the "Lincoln Brigade" (an inside joke on their left-wing stereotype, referring to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the group of American leftists who, in the 1930s, had gone off to fight against fascists in the Spanish Civil War). Over the years, when these alumni-officers were appointed to high-level positions, they'd usually phone Colonel Lincoln--or, later on, his successors as department chairmen--and ask for the new crop of top Sosh cadets, or the most promising junior faculty members, to come work as their assistants. • • • When John Nagl passed through the gates of West Point in the fall of 1983, as a visiting high school senior who'd applied for admission the following year, he knew right away that this was where he wanted to be. His father, a retired Navy officer who worked at a nuclear power plant, had driven him all the way from their home in Omaha, Nebraska, where John was an honors student at Creighton Prep, an all-boys' Jesuit school. John had grown up in a conservative Catholic family, the oldest of six children, four of them boys, each named after a Gospel in the New Testament (John, Matthew, Luke, and Mark). His hometown served as the base for the Strategic Air Command and was thus America's most likely ground zero--the Kremlin's number-one target--in the event of nuclear war. At the time of Nagl's West Point visit, the Cold War was heating up, and President Ronald Reagan was pouring tens of billions of dollars into a new generation of major Army weapons: M-1 tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Apache helicopters, and the Multiple Launch Rocket System. It was a logical fit for Nagl to go to one of the military academies; the Army seemed right for the time. He was dazzled by the grandeur of the buildings and the grounds, the vista views of the Hudson, the hallowed history all around him. Nearly every prominent Army general had walked these grounds as a cadet, and Nagl fully expected to join their ranks. He wouldn't make it that far; he'd wind up retiring from the Army before making even full colonel. But along the way, he made a deeper mark, and garnered more fame, than most generals ever had in their lifetimes. And he did this while climbing through the ranks of the Lincoln Brigade--initially as a cadet, then as an acolyte, and finally as a network-builder himself. His first and pivotal mentor in this fraternal order of soldier-scholars was an Army major named David Howell Petraeus. Excerpted from The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War by Fred Kaplan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
1 "What We Need Is an Officer with Three Heads" | p. 1 |
2 "Another Type of Warfare" | p. 11 |
3 "Eating Soup with a Knife" | p. 35 |
4 Revolutions | p. 44 |
5 The Insurgent at War | p. 61 |
6 The Irregulars | p. 79 |
7 "Where's My Counterinsurgency Plan?" | p. 94 |
8 The Basin Harbor Gang | p. 108 |
9 The Directive | p. 117 |
10 The Insurgent in the Engine Room of Change | p. 126 |
11 The Workshop at Tatooine | p. 153 |
12 Hearts & Minds | p. 166 |
13 "Clear, Hold, and Build" | p. 191 |
14 "We Are Pulling in Different Directions" | p. 204 |
15 The Field Manual | p. 213 |
16 The Surge | p. 223 |
17 Awakenings | p. 244 |
18 The Insurgent in the Pentagon | p. 270 |
19 "It Is Folly" | p. 284 |
20 Coin Versus CT | p. 294 |
21 "Storm Clouds" | p. 319 |
22 "A New American Way of War" | p. 349 |
Postscript | p. 367 |
Notes | p. 369 |
Interviews | p. 397 |
Acknowledgments | p. 399 |
Index | p. 401 |