The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Such stellar performances in mental and physical stamina were necessary because he had three strikes against him. First, he was an intellectual, holding an Ivy League doctorate in international relations. “General Petraeus was successful not because of, but almost despite, his Ph.D. from Princeton,” commented Lt. Col. Suzanne Nielsen, an aide of his who herself earned a Harvard doctorate in political science. Second, Petraeus was friendly with journalists and politicians, two groups that Army generals are taught to treat with contemptuous distance. The Army ideal is the hero of the novel Once an Eagle, Gen. Sam Damon, a muddy-boots type who loves being in the field and grows increasingly inarticulate the closer he gets to Washington. To most Army generals, enjoying conversations with the type of people who dominate the business of the nation’s capital borders on eccentricity at best and immorality at worst. In any event, it is suspicious behavior. The derogatory term for it is “standing close to the flagpole.”

  Most telling was the third strike: Alone among Army generals, Petraeus had posted an unquestionably successful tour as a division commander in Iraq during the invasion and the first year of the war, a conclusion confirmed in an official study by the Army War College. Commanding the 101st Airborne Division, he conducted what was generally seen as a thorough and effective campaign that balanced war fighting and nation building in Mosul, the biggest city in northern Iraq. Petraeus had laid down three rules for his subordinate commanders: We are in a race against time, give the locals you deal with a stake in the new Iraq, and don’t do anything that creates more enemies than it removes.

  By contrast, during that first year of the war, most U.S. commanders did what they knew how to do, not what they needed to do, noted Keane, who knew most of them well. “Our guys, . . . with the exception of Petraeus, were executing what they know, and what they knew is conventional operations—you saw that in spades.”

  A major difference in background between Petraeus and most of his peers in that first year in Iraq was that he came out of the “light infantry” Army. Iraq was seen at the outset by some as the star turn of the “heavy Army”—that is, units built around tanks and other armored vehicles. The invasion of Afghanistan 18 months earlier had been a “light force” war, featuring Special Forces and, a bit later, the 10th Mountain Division and some Marine units. Iraq was to be the heavy Army’s turn. The early top commanders in Iraq—Tommy R. Franks and Ricardo Sanchez—were products of that mechanized force. Petraeus, by contrast, was a light infantryman, having spent much of his field time with the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne and the helicopter-borne soldiers of the 101st Airborne. The term “light” is a bit of misnomer, because these troops carry everything they can on their backs, from ammunition to medicine, often staggering under the loads. But “light” means that such units rely very little on tanks, artillery, and other heavy weaponry. “That’s significant,” noted Tom Donnelly, a longtime student of the Army and its cultures. “For one thing, it makes you less obsessed with technology. The airborne community always knew that there was more to worry about than tank warfare in Europe’s central front,” the main focus of most of the late twentieth-century Army. While the tankers stayed in Germany, he said, “the light infantry did the Caribbean, Panama, peacekeeping in the Sinai.”

  That background may also illuminate the different approach Petraeus would take to the roadside bomb, the key enemy weapon in the war. The U.S. military ultimately would spend well over $10 billion on technology to counter the threat posed by IEDs, or “improvised explosive devices.” While some of the new devices stymied explosions, they tended just to push the enemy to devise a more sophisticated trigger mechanism and more devastating bombs. The number of attacks would not begin to decline until 2007, when Petraeus was in command. The answer then turned out to be not technological but physical and cultural—get the troops out among the people, protect them, stay with them, and they will begin to talk to you. And even those who won’t talk might help in other ways, such as anonymously spray-painting orange arrows on the asphalt to indicate where a bomb had been planted the previous night.

  But even more significant than Petraeus’s military background is his determination. It is the cornerstone of his personality and a characteristic that seems to strike everyone he meets. One of his favorite words is “relentless.” Donnelly first encountered Petraeus in the late 1980s, when Petraeus was a young major. “He was almost identical to the guy you find today—very bright, very ambitious,” Donnelly recalled. “Always ready to go for a run. Every day was a good day for him.”

  Some of his peers saw him as ferociously ambitious, all too willing to court congressmen and journalists. Those critics felt their suspicions were confirmed when Petraeus told a Washington Post reporter that his role in Mosul in 2003-4 was “a combination of being the president and the pope.” Even among his admirers there churns an ambivalence about him, often provoked by his overwhelming drive. In a memoir of invading Iraq in 2003 with Petraeus, Rick Atkinson, the journalist who knows Petraeus best and has remained friendly with him, wrote, “If others found him hard to love—his intensity, his competitiveness, and serrated intellect made adoration difficult—he was nevertheless broadly respected and instantly obeyed.” That is an especially striking assessment because Atkinson, according to then-Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, the assistant commander to Petraeus, was “probably closer to him than anyone in the division.”

  Trying to explain his unease about Petraeus, an officer who has known him for years said, “I really respect his intelligence. He is very disciplined. But I’m not comfortable with his competitiveness.” He said he found it difficult to get Petraeus to engage in a normal conversation. “It is all a race. Everything is a race. It’s a narcissistic, exploitative way of dealing with people.” This approach also has a long-term cost, he said: “Dave tends not to build teams, or think about what happens afterwards. It’s the Dave Petraeus Show.”

  Such criticisms aren’t entirely justified, because Petraeus, more than most generals, keeps an eye out for smart younger officers and helps them along in their careers. But even one of those protégés was mixed in his evaluation. “David Petraeus is the best general in the U.S. Army, bar none,” said this officer, who has known him for more than a decade. But, he added, “He also isn’t half as good as he thinks he is.”

  Another admirer, Capt. Erica Watson Borggren, graduated from West Point in 2002 and went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. When she first met Petraeus, she recalled, he asked, “What was your class ranking?” He was referring to the academy’s class position, which is based on a mix of academic records, military leadership skills, and physical fitness tests. It is a key number because standing determines the order by which cadets pick their branch of the Army—infantry, armor, artillery, aviation, military intelligence, and so on.

  “First academically, seventh overall,” she responded.

  “What dragged you down?” Petraeus asked.

  She was amazed. First in academics and seventh overall was an extraordinary performance in a class of 989. She had played varsity tennis, had tutored other cadets, had become a youth minister and a parachutist. She thought to herself, “What do you mean, ‘dragged down’?” But she was restrained in what she actually said to the hypercompetitive general: “Well, if you look it at that way.” (Petraeus, who finished fortieth in his 1974 graduating class of 833 cadets, said he had been joking.)

  “I worked with him,” said David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency theorist who Petraeus would bring to Iraq as his adviser. “But I am not sure I know him.”

  Donnelly, a defense expert with a gimlet eye for the Army, said he felt that he has never been able to get below the surface of Petraeus. “The distinction between the mask and the man is impossible for me to distinguish. He has always been that way. I think he is doing what he always wanted to do, and it is deeply fulfilling.” Indeed, under that mask may be simply many more hard laminations of talent and drive. Donnelly added that he doesn’t think Pet
raeus’s dreams extend to political office. Rather, he said, “He has an ambition to make his mark on the Army, on history. He wants to make his name as a great captain.” Asked in a 2008 interview if he had ever considered being national security adviser, Petraeus appeared mildly intrigued. But when asked if he would like to be a professor of international relations at Princeton, he responded with excitement and a grin and said it would be a “thrill.”

  It was his extraordinary force of will that persuaded Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the chief of staff of the Army, to send Petraeus to Fort Leavenworth. “Shake it up,” Schoomaker told Petraeus, who would need every ounce of his strength to change the way the Army thought about the war in Iraq.

  2.

  HOW TO FIGHT THIS WAR

  (Fall 2005-Fall 2006)

  In February 2006, Petraeus convened a meeting at Fort Leavenworth of about 135 experts on irregular warfare to discuss a new manual for the Army and Marine Corps about how to conduct counterinsurgency operations. When he called the session to order, he looked out across a tiered classroom in Tice Hall, a squat, one-story brick building in a corner of the base, not far from Leavenworth’s forbidding old gray federal penitentiary. Usually used to train National Guard commanders, on this day the classroom held not just military officers but also representatives from the CIA and the State Department, academics, human rights advocates, even a select group of high-profile journalists. It was instantly clear that this wasn’t going to be the standard Army manual written by two tired majors laboring in a basement somewhere in Fort Leavenworth. “I thought the most interesting thing was the range of attendees, which spoke volumes about Petraeus,” said Eliot Cohen. The two had known each other since the mid-1980s, when Petraeus, then a major, was teaching at West Point, and Cohen at Harvard.

  What wasn’t clear was whether the manual would be produced in time to make a difference in the Iraq war, which the attendees knew was heading south fast. One of those present, Kalev Sepp, was fresh from doing his study in Iraq for Gen. Casey of how well U.S. commanders in Iraq had absorbed counterinsurgency theory. His worrisome conclusion had been that 20 percent of them got it, 60 percent were struggling, and 20 percent were trying to fight a conventional war, “oblivious to the inefficacy and counterproductivity of their operations.” In other words, more than half of the U.S. war effort was wasted, and a good part of it was actually hurting the cause.

  Petraeus, aware of that troubling finding, began the conference by noting a fundamental difference. In the past, he said, the Army had taught officers what to think. Now, he said, it needed to teach them how to think. Then he sat down next to Sarah Sewall, director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Just that act in itself made it clear that this effort wasn’t going to follow the usual way the Army devised doctrine.

  Conrad Crane, the Army historian, kicked off the discussions by handing out more than a hundred small, hard pieces of green stones with red veins in them. It was coprolite. “They’re pretty, polished, like gem stones,” he told the audience. But, he explained, coprolite is actually fossilized dinosaur excrement. This, Crane warned, was what he didn’t want the new counter-insurgency manual to be: a new polishing of old crap. “There has never been an Army manual created the way this one was,” he said later. “It was truly a unique process.”

  Until Petraeus arrived at Leavenworth, its magazine, Military Review, had been a backwater even in the sleepy world of official military publications. Under his command, Col. Bill Darley, its editor, quickly turned it into a must-read bimonthly dispatch from the front lines. It opened its pages to the views of young officers angry over how generals were fighting the Iraq war. The magazine sometimes made news itself. One of its most controversial articles had been by a British officer, Brig. Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who accused the American military in Iraq of cultural ignorance, moralistic self-righteousness, unproductive micromanagement, and unwarranted optimism. He specifically charged that the Americans displayed such “cultural insensitivity” in the war that it “arguably amounted to institutional racism” and may have spurred the growth of the insurgency. Most relevant to Petraeus’s purposes, he contended that the U.S. military’s handling of Iraqis “exacerbated the task it now faces by alienating significant sections of the population.” The meeting kicked off with Aylwin-Foster standing up to review and expand on his explosive charges.

  The human rights specialists present were upset by a passage in an early draft of the counterinsurgency manual that was ambiguous about the use of torture in interrogations. It seemed to say that sometimes extreme measures might be deemed necessary, but they were still immoral, so any commander allowing such practices should then confess to a superior officer. Crane and his confreres already harbored doubts about that section and immediately agreed to strike it.

  One purpose of the meeting was to ensure that the manual would stand up to such criticism; another was to build support for it. “I think that is always the way to go—inclusion is generally the appropriate course of action,” Petraeus said later. “Frankly, if you can’t convince 95 percent of the rational thinkers, perhaps the concept needs to be reexamined.” He also saw it as a team-building exercise, he added, for the people who would be writing sections for Conrad Crane to get to know one another and how they thought.

  Petraeus watched and listened while Crane “played ringmaster,” running the discussions. “I was both physically and mentally exhausted by the end” of the two-day session, Crane said.

  The manual that would be produced in the following months adhered to the classic tenets of counterinsurgency—yet in doing so it was prescribing a radical shift for the U.S. military. Historically, Americans have liked to use “overwhelming force,” which under Gen. Colin Powell’s influence was elevated to a first principle. But counterinsurgency, according to David Galula, the French officer who while at Harvard in 1963 wrote what is probably the best book on the subject, requires that the minimum of firepower and force be used. Galula also admonished that the people are the prize. “The population . . . becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy,” he wrote, drawing on his experiences in World War II, the French war in Indochina, and the Algerian war, as well as his firsthand observations of the Greek civil war and Mao Zedong’s Communist campaign in China.

  If the manual were to have the desired effect, it needed to offer a sharp critique of how the U.S. Army had operated in Iraq for the previous several years. But pointing out the flaws in the American approach was delicate, because this could complicate the task of getting the Army to follow the manual. Many of the generals implicitly skewered in its analysis were still in the Army, and some were running it.

  Just a month after the conference, four experts—Crane, Cohen, Lt. Col. Jan Horvath, and Lt. Col. John Nagl, who had studied under Petraeus at West Point—sent up the first flare to the Army and those watching it, signaling that the new counterinsurgency manual would be very different from the usual, small-bore stuff of Army doctrine. The heart of their article in Military Review was a list of the “paradoxes of counterinsurgency.” (This emphasis certainly was influenced by five years of American experience in Iraq—and it is interesting to note that playing with paradox is one of the hallmarks of the classical Arab literature produced in Baghdad at its zenith under the Abbasid caliphs.)

  Among the conundrums the article explored:

  • “The more you protect your force, the less secure you are.” In other words, it said, you need to get out among the population, because in the long run, that is the way to improve security. “If military forces stay locked up in compounds, they lose touch with the people who are the ultimate arbiters of victory.”

  • “The more force you use, the less effective you are.” That is, you are trying to establish the rule of law, and the way to get there is through restraint, whenever possible. Aim for normalcy.

  • “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.” This was perhaps the hardest lesson for the can-
do, gung-ho U.S. military to take on board. Don’t let yourself be provoked into action, because it may be counterproductive.

  The article made clear that Petraeus and the people around him were seeking not only to change the way the Army was fighting in Iraq but also to change the Army itself. Its last paragraph began, “We are at a turning point in the Army’s institutional history.” Petraeus was out to alter how the Army thought about war—a major intellectual, cultural, and emotional shift for a huge and tradition-minded organization.

  In June, Crane circulated a new draft of the manual around the Army and Marine Corps. “This was the six-hundred-thousand-editor stage,” he said, referring to the combined active-duty size of the two services. There clearly was a thirst out there for a new approach, reflected in the “thousands” of comments he received.

  The manual also would borrow liberally from the work being done that summer by Australian army Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, a quirky infantryman with a Ph.D. in the anthropology of Islamic extremism, a wicked wit, and experience fighting in Timor. Kilcullen came to Petraeus’s attention when he wrote an essay breezily titled “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency”—that is, going one better than Lawrence of Arabia’s famous “Twenty-Seven Articles” on how to fight in the Middle East in 1917.

  At the time, Kilcullen’s principles seemed astonishing, and not just because they were articulated with a directness not often seen in public in the U.S. military. His third principle set the tone of the essay: “In counterinsurgency, killing the enemy is easy. Finding him is often nearly impossible.” He also was quite willing to disregard military hierarchy if that was what was required to prevail. “Rank is nothing; talent is everything,” he advised in his eighth principle. “Not everyone is good at counterinsurgency. Many people don’t understand the concept, and some can’t execute it. It is difficult, and in a conventional force only a few people will master it. Anyone can learn the basics, but a few naturals do exist. Learn how to spot these people, and put them into positions where they can make a difference. Rank matters far less than talent—a few good men led by a smart junior noncommissioned officer can succeed in counterinsurgency, where hundreds of well-armed soldiers under a mediocre senior officer will fail.”