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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Part of the change may stem from his knowledge that he most likely would be reporting to Petraeus, who had been steeped in counterinsurgency theory. Odierno is “a good leader, charismatic, and a tactically competent soldier,” said Donnelly, the defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “I think that intellectually, he has learned from his mistakes. And I think that working for Petraeus makes all the difference in the world. It is very different from working for [Lt. Gen.] Sanchez and getting no education.”

  Another impetus to change, Odierno agreed in an interview, was the severe wounding of his son in August 2004. Lt. Anthony Odierno, then in the 1st Cavalry Division, had been leading a patrol near Baghdad’s airport when a rocket-propelled grenade punched through the door of his Humvee, severed his left arm, and then mortally wounded his driver. “It didn’t affect me as a military officer, I mean that,” Odierno said one evening in Baghdad much later. “It affected me as a person. I hold no grudges. My son and I talked a lot about this. He was doing what he wanted to do, and liked what he was doing.” But he said it did deepen his determination. “I was going to see this through—I felt an obligation to see this through. That drives me, frankly. I feel an obligation to mothers and fathers. Maybe I understand it better because it happened to me.”

  But the most important part of it was likely the growing recognition in the fall of 2006, as he prepared to redeploy, that the war was heading toward defeat, and it might occur on his watch. He didn’t want to lose and realized that meant taking on his new boss, Casey. On a predeployment trip to Iraq in August, he had been told that the plan was to cut combat troop levels by as much as one-third in 2007. On December 4, he was briefed on the plan he would be implementing, called the Bridging Strategy, which of course was referred to in U.S. military circles as “TBS.”

  This was an all-important briefing for Odierno, because it amounted to his overarching orders for the next year. Officially, his job was not to assess and challenge these goals, but to figure out how to achieve them. The key points were:

  • “Move outside all major cities” and establish a handful of even bigger bases along key roads leading into Iraq,

  • deploy U.S. forces to Iraq’s borders in order to limit outside influence,

  • speed up the transition to Iraqi security forces, and

  • let Iraqis handle fighting in the cities.

  Together this plan (the briefing is reprinted in the appendix) amounted to a half withdrawal, not leaving Iraq but hanging on its periphery. The more Odierno and his planners considered this plan, they less they liked it. They feared that it got ahead of the ability of the Iraqis to do the job, and so, in keeping with the American pattern in Iraq from 2003 on, would likely amount to one more rush to failure. He was, he recalled, “very nervous” about the course of U.S. strategy. He decided he would formally oppose any additional troop cuts. He wasn’t even thinking about a surge, because, he said, “I didn’t think I could get more.”

  After taking command in December, Odierno and a small group of advisers met almost every night for several weeks, trying to figure a way out of the jam. Ultimately, they would decide on a course almost the opposite of the plan given them. Instead of moving out of the cities, they would deploy more into them.

  Instead of consolidating their base structure, they would establish scores of smaller outposts. Nor would they withdraw to the borders. And most emphatically, they would slow the transition to Iraqi forces. He realized that to take all those steps he would need more troops—something Keane had been telling him in telephone calls. “Odierno was standing up to Casey, and he deserves a lot of credit for it,” said Keane, who was trying to get to Iraq. “I was trying to go see him, but Casey wouldn’t let me come in.” Keane called Casey directly, but the general put him off, saying, “It’s a really bad time.”

  Petraeus also was talking to Odierno about the notion of a major increase in troops. When Casey got wind of it, he had his executive officer call Petraeus with a message: “Hey, man, don’t be calling Ray.” Petraeus responded that he had been asked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to look at Iraq and so needed to talk to senior officers there.

  By mid-December it was clear to subordinates that Casey and Odierno were at odds. “Casey fought it all the way,” recalled Brig. Gen. Joe Anderson, Odierno’s chief of staff. Planners were beginning to scratch their heads. Odierno was telling them to figure out how they might employ several brigades. “We would backbrief one general and get one set of guidances, and then brief the other and get a different set,” remembered one senior Army planner in Iraq.

  Keane, who was talking to Odierno once or twice a week by telephone, told Odierno that he should ask for five brigades. But when Odierno raised that number with Casey, his commander threw cold water on the notion. “He said, ‘You can do it with two brigades,’ ” Odierno recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know.’” Casey eventually said that they could deploy only one brigade a month anyway, so he would commit to two brigades, and then make a decision about each additional one. Casey’s notion, coming off the disappointment of the Together Forward operations the previous summer, was to stiffen the backbone of Iraqi forces operating in Baghdad by putting them in some joint outposts with American troops. He figured it would take about two U.S. brigades—perhaps 7,500 soldiers—to do that. He wasn’t particularly interested in the other three brigades.

  Hearing about the two-plus-three compromise, Keane first hit the roof and then called the White House. Odierno “started with one brigade, and Casey was fighting him over the first brigade,” Keane recalled, “and then he finally gave him one. And then he fought for a second one and then they came up with this god-forsaken strategy of having three on hold in the U.S. and advancing them one at a time as needed, advance to Kuwait and then go from Kuwait to Baghdad. I knew what was going on here. Its pretty obvious—Casey doesn’t want his strategy dramatically changed.”

  Keane, believing that Casey’s incremental approach was unsound both militarily and politically, warned Hadley, the national security adviser, that having three units on hold would mean that there would be a separate debate about each one being sent. “Just think about what’s going to happen,” he told Hadley. “You are not going to be effective in bringing down the violence with only two additional brigades, therefore you will call for an additional brigade three separate times, each time because we do not have sufficient troops. The media will be all over you for failing three more times. Meanwhile, the president is going to bite this bullet; he should only bite it once. He shouldn’t bite it one time and then three more times.”

  Hadley agreed: “Yeah, this makes no sense.”

  Keane told White House officials that “there was a huge struggle going on inside the command.” He also broke the news to Hadley that the surge wouldn’t conclude by midsummer. “Can we get that wrapped up in, what, five or six months?” he recalled Hadley asking him. “That’ll be the summer and we can hold on to the wobbly Republicans because we’ve made some progress.”

  Hell no, Keane responded. “It will take all that time to get them in there. . . . It’s going to take twelve to eighteen months before we can realistically start reducing these forces.”

  Odierno told his planners to think about how they would use five additional brigades of combat troops. The planners were puzzled—they didn’t think he would ever be given that many. They didn’t know how he had come up with that number. “That stuff just kind of shows up,” said Lt. Col. Jeff McDougall, one of his top planners. “You don’t know, sitting in our little dungeon, where that stuff comes from.”

  One day in December, Odierno told his planners, “We have to secure the population, first thing. We have to get back out into Baghdad.” They and Odierno thought that they really needed about eight brigades but knew that no more than five were available, and that it would take months to get them all to Iraq. Odierno thought that the shortfall could be made up somewhat by adding other, smaller units, such as Marine battali
ons, a helicopter squadron, and some Special Operations troops.

  Casey’s resistance was being supported by the chief of the Army and other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The notion of escalation had been floating around, and most of the chain of command was against the idea. “I was not supportive at the time because of several concerns that I had,” said Gen. Pete Schoomaker, the then chief of staff of the Army. “First, that no one had articulated or had established a clear purpose for the surge, including how to know when that purpose had been achieved.” Also, he thought it would hurt the readiness of the Army without any clear payoff.

  Casey finally agreed to an increase of two Army brigades and two Marine battalions, plus one more brigade on tap in Kuwait, recalled Maj. Gen. Barbero, who at the time was watching from the Pentagon as the J-33, or deputy director for current operations, for the staff of the Joint Chiefs. (A brigade has about 3,500 soldiers, while a Marine infantry battalion has about 750.) This was more or less where the council of colonels had come out. Barbero thought it was exactly the wrong answer and said so at Pentagon meetings. “This is the worst course of action we could do,” he argued, “enough to put a strain on the force, but not enough to do anything.”

  Barbero had once commanded a battalion in the 101st Airborne, and he also was talking to his old division commander, Jack Keane. “He was the first person I heard the number five brigades from,” he said. And, typical of the web of personal connections that every military career produces, he also had been the assistant commander of the 4th Infantry Division from 2003-4—serving under Raymond Odierno.

  As Odierno’s planners worked on a big surge, the political context of the war began to change—and that tipped the balance in their favor. Back in Washington, the Iraq Study Group recommended accelerating the American turnover to Iraqis. This was far different than what Odierno was advocating but was pretty much what Casey had told him to do, except faster—that is, get U.S. forces out of combat and speed the transition to Iraqi security forces. The biggest difference was that the group recommended a tighter deadline, of getting U.S. combat forces out by early 2008.

  But, coming just a month after the November 2006 elections, the political effect of the Iraq Study Group may have been more significant. “The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” began its report, released on December 6. This grim finding, the consensus view of political and military experts from across the spectrum, ultimately was the real contribution of the group. “It stopped all the happy talk about how well things were going and how the press was reporting it wrong,” noted former defense secretary Perry, one of its members.

  Just before the elections, the president had said, “Absolutely, we’re winning.” On December 6, the same day that the Iraq Study Group released its report, a new defense secretary, Robert Gates, who had been a member until his nomination, was confirmed by the Senate. He was sworn in December 18. The next day, Gates’s first full one at the Pentagon, President Bush said for the first time, “We’re not winning, we’re not losing in Iraq”—a striking turnaround from his formulation the previous month. (He also said that he was planning even before the election to replace Rumsfeld.) A month later, the president would go another step and say that the course he was on in 2006 was “maybe a slow failure.”

  Gates is a surprising man. The white-haired former CIA director is calm, quiet, and soft-voiced, reserved almost to the point of seeming humble—a presentation that blurs his tough-minded nature. One key to his nature is an observation he offers in his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows, that some of the most effective U.S. officials he had seen were Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and George Shultz. The commonality among them, he concluded, was that they were “basically hawks who drew extensively on the ideas and initiatives of the doves.”

  In office Gates would prove both less windy and more decisive than his predecessor. “The interesting thing about Rumsfeld is that he didn’t make decisions,” defense expert Anthony Cordesman said after Rumsfeld’s firing. Referring to the defense secretary during the Vietnam War to whom Rumsfeld was often likened, he added, “McNamara at least made decisions. Rumsfeld micromanaged, but he didn’t make decisions.” Gates also would bring a skeptical view of the Iraq war shaped by his time on the Iraq Study Group. He had been at the Pentagon just two days when Gen. Abizaid, the head of Central Command, announced that he planned to retire a few months later. “He was told, ‘It’s time to go, we need some fresh air here,”’ recalled an officer who was at Centcom at the time. Abizaid disputes that, saying that he had submitted his request to retire months earlier, and that it had been approved by Rumsfeld.

  In any event, it would soon become evident that behind the new defense secretary’s slight smile lurked a very sharp set of teeth. In the spring of 2007, he would fire Army secretary Francis Harvey and the Army surgeon general over their sluggish handling of a scandal about the poor treatment of recuperating soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. That June, he would ease out the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Pace, who at that point was the last senior military figure associated with the botched handling of the first three years of the war who was still in office. In March 2008, he would throw overboard Adm. William “Fox” Fallon, Abizaid’s successor. Three months later he would simultaneously oust the Air Force chief of staff and the Air Force secretary over lapses in that service’s handling of nuclear weapons. He executed these decisions in a soft-spoken way, showing no emotion. It was the opposite of Rumsfeld, who barked but appeared to have no bite.

  Indeed, Gates was greeted as a liberator at the Pentagon simply because he wasn’t Rumsfeld. “You can already feel the stability,” said retired Air Force Gen. Charles Wald, formerly the deputy U.S. commander in Europe, who deemed the appointment of Gates to be the Bush administration’s best move in years.

  In the following months, he would be greeted with similar relief in Baghdad. “He seems to be just about everything you want in a sec def,” said Charlie Miller, an aide to Petraeus in 2007 who would sit in on several video-teleconferences with Gates. “It’s too bad we didn’t have him from the get-go, instead of the other guy.”

  The day after Gates took office, he asked Petraeus to come talk to him about Iraq. “I’m going to Iraq in two hours,” the new defense secretary said. “What should I look for?”

  Petraeus had been thinking for months about the war and about how to change it. He had been talking to staff members on the National Security Council, among others, and also had “reviewed very carefully the AEI findings” from the exercise that Kagan and Keane had done. So when Gates asked, he was ready. Both men understood that the context of the conversation was that Petraeus was being considered for top command in Iraq, and at a crucial time. “You should focus on whether or not the approach is working,” Petraeus said. “Get a sense of whether the emphasis on transition to ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] is working or not,” and also on whether that emphasis is “appropriate, given the level of violence.”

  Another thing that emerged in the conversation was that the two men shared a preference for candid, even blunt assessments that would lead to strategic clarity. Both understood the need for more precision about the U.S. mission in Iraq.

  Gates had another question. Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, had concurred with an intelligence assessment that the U.S. effort was failing. What, Gates asked, did Petraeus think of that? I haven’t been in Iraq for a while, Petraeus responded, but from what I can tell, it is correct.

  Then Gates left for Iraq, bringing with him Gen. Pace. In Baghdad he met with Abizaid, Casey, and Odierno. The first two generals were at loggerheads with Odierno, the newer, younger, and junior officer pushing hard for more troops. Gates was soft-voiced and guarded. He listened but gave no indication of which way was he was leaning. Anderson, Odierno’s chief of staff, recalled that Pace offered the whiff of a possibility of meeting Odierno’s request. “What if we gave you more?” he asked in a meeting. “What if we ga
ve you five brigade combat teams?” He seemed to be asking if they really had anything to show: What makes you guys smarter than Casey, Abizaid, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

  Gates, to his credit, also breakfasted with a group of young soldiers and found far more agreement there on the need for more manpower. “Never mind all the generals standing around,” he began, according to a tape recording of the meeting, which reporters didn’t attend. While Odierno and Pace listened, Spec. Jason Glenn, a drone aircraft operator for the 1st Infantry Division, told him that when he flew his aircraft over insurgents, they would just look up at it, “so I really think we need more troops here, with more presence on the ground. More troops might hold them off long enough to where we can get the Iraqi army trained up.”

  Pfc. Cassandra Wallace seconded that view. “I think we do need more troops over here,” the Texan said. “More troops would help us integrate the Iraqi army into patrols more.”

  On the long flight home to Washington in a C-17 military cargo jet, Gates disappeared into his mobile home in the jet’s belly with Gen. Pace and a bottle of California cabernet sauvignon. A few days later, Odierno got the word: Gates wants you to have all five brigades. “The surge really began the day that Gates visited,” Odierno later concluded.

  But the issue was still in the air. While Gates and Pace were traveling, Bush gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he began by emphasizing his intention to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps. “The reason why is, it is an accurate reflection that this ideological war we’re in is going to last for a while, and that we’re going to need a military that’s capable of being able to sustain our efforts,” Bush explained. It was an odd statement to make, coming more than five years after the 9/11 attack. Yet it hinted at the major strategic shift the president was contemplating: dropping the pattern of overoptimistic assumptions and instead moving to a strategy for long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.