GEN David Petraeus' year-end letter to the troops

GEN Petraeus' letter is copied from the excellent Small Wars Journal:

HEADQUARTERS
MULTI-NATIONAL FORCE - IRAQ
BAGHDAD, IRAQ
APO AE 09342-1400

28 December 2007

Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and Civilians of Multi-National Force-Iraq:

As 2007 draws to a close, you should look back with pride on what you, your fellow troopers, our Iraqi partners, and Iraqi Coalition civilians have achieved in 2007. A year ago, Iraq was racked by horrific violence and on the brink of civil war. Now, levels of violence and civilians and military casualties are significantly reduced and hope has been rekindled in many Iraqi communities. To be sure, the progress is reversible and there is much more to be done. Nonetheless, the hard-fought accomplishments of 2007 have been substantial, and I want to thank each of you for the contributions you made to them.

In response to the challenges that faced Iraq a year ago, we and our Iraqi partners adopted a new approach. We increased our focus on securing the Iraqi people and, in some cases, delayed transition of tasks to Iraqi forces. Additional U.S. and Georgian forces were deployed to theater, the tours of U.S. unites were extended, and Iraqi forces conducted a surge of their own, generating well over 100,000 more Iraqi police and soldiers during the year so that they, too, had additional forces to execute the new approach. In places like Ramadi, Baqubah, Arab Jabour, and Baghdad, you and our Iraqi brothers fought—often house by house, block by block, and neighborhood by neighborhood—to wrest sanctuaries away from Al Qaeda-Iraq, to disrupt extremist militia elements, and to rid the streets of mafia-like criminals. Having cleared areas, you worked with Iraqis to retain them—establishing outposts in the areas we were securing, developing Iraqi Security Forces, and empowering locals to help our efforts. This approach has not been easy. It has required steadfastness in the conduct of tough offensive operations, creative solutions to the myriad problems on the ground, and persistence over the course of many months and during countless trying situations. Through it all, you have proven equal to every task, continually demonstrating an impressive ability to conduct combat and stability operations in an exceedingly complex environment.

Your accomplishments have given the Iraqi people new confidence and prompted many citizens to reject terror and confront those who practice it. As the months passed in 2007, in fact, the tribal awakening that began in Al Anbar Province spread to other parts of the country. Emboldened by improving security and tired of indiscriminate violence, extremist ideology, oppressive practices, and criminal activity, Iraqis increasingly rejected Al Qaeda-Iraq and rogue militia elements. Over time, the desire of Iraqis to contribute to their own security has manifested itself in citizens volunteering for the police, the Army, and concerned local citizen programs. It has been reflected in citizens providing information that has helped us find far more than double the number of arms and weapons caches we found last year. And it has been apparent in Iraqi communities now supporting their local security forces.

As a result of your hard work and that of our Iraqi comrades-in-arms—and with the support of the local populace in many areas—we have seen significant improvements in the security situation. The number of attacks per week is down some 60 percent from a peak in June of this year to a level last seen consistently in the early summer of 2005. With fewer attacks, we are also seeing significantly reduced loss of life. The number of civilian deaths is down by some 75 percent since its height a year ago, dropping to a level not seen since the beginning of 2006. And the number of Coalition losses is down substantially as well. We remain mindful that the past year’s progress has been purchased through the sacrifice and selfless service of all those involved and that the new Iraq must still contend with innumerable enemies and obstacles. Al Qaeda-Iraq has been significantly degraded, but it remains capable of horrific bombings. Militia extremists have been disrupted, but they retain influence in many areas. Criminals have been apprehended, but far too many still roam Iraqi streets and intimidate local citizens and Iraqi officials. We and our Iraqi partners will have to deal with each of these challenges in the New Year to keep the situation headed in the right direction.

While the progress in a number of areas is fragile, the security improvements have significantly changed the situation in many parts of Iraq. It is now imperative that we take advantage of these improvements by looking beyond the security arena and helping Iraqi military and political leaders as they develop solutions in other areas as well, solutions they can sustain over time. At the tactical level, this means an increasing focus on helping not just Iraqi Security Forces—with whom we must partner in all that we do—but also helping Iraqi governmental organizations as they endeavor to restore basic services, to create employment opportunities, to revitalize local markets, to refurbish schools, to spur local economic activity, and to keep locals involved in contributing to local security. We will have to do all of this, of course, while continuing to draw down our forces, thinning our presence, and gradually handing over responsibilities to our Iraqi partners. Meanwhile, at the national level, we will focus on helping the Iraqi Government integrate local volunteers into the Iraqi Security Forces and other employment, develop greater ministerial capacity and capability, aid displaced persons as they return, and, most importantly, take the all-important political and economic actions needed to exploit the opportunity provided by the gains in the security arena.

The pace of progress on important political actions to this point has been slower than Iraqi leaders had hoped. Still, there have been some important steps taken in recent months. Iraq’s leaders reached agreement on the Declaration of Principles for Friendship and Cooperation with the United States, which lays the groundwork for an enduring relationship between our nations. The United Nations Security Council approved Iraq’s request for a final renewal of the resolution that authorizes the Coalition to operate in Iraq. Iraq’s leaders passed an important Pension Law that not only extends retirement benefits to Iraqis previously left out but also represents the first of what we hope will be additional measures fostering national reconciliation. And Iraq’s leaders have debated at length a second reconciliation-related measure, the Accountability and Justice Bill (the de-Ba’athification Reform Law), as well as the 2008 National Budget, both which likely will be brought up for a vote in early 2008. Even so, all Iraqi participants recognize that much more must be done politically to put their country on an irreversible trajectory to national reconciliation and sustainable economic development. We will, needless to say, work closely with our Embassy teammates to support the Iraq Government as it strives to take advantage of the improved security environment by pursing political and economic progress.

The New Year will bring many changes. Substantial force rotations and adjustments already underway will continue. One Army brigade combat team and a Marine Expeditionary Unit have already redeployed without replacement. In the coming months, four additional brigades and two Marine battalions will follow suit. Throughout that time, we will continue to adapt to the security situation as it evolves. And in the midst of all the changes, we and our Iraqi partners will strive to maintain the momentum, to press the fight, and to pursue Iraq’s enemies relentlessly. Solutions to many of the tough problems will continue to be found at your level, together with local Iraqi leaders and with your Iraqi Security Force partners, in company and battalion areas of operation and in individual neighborhoods an towns. As you and your Iraqi partners turn concepts into reality, additional progress will emerge slowly and fitfully. Over time, we will gradually see fewer bad days and accumulate more good days, good weeks, and good months.

The way ahead will not be easy. Inevitably, there will be more tough days and tough weeks. Unforeseen challenges will emerge. And success will require continued hard work, commitment, and initiative from all involved. As we look to the future, however, we should remember how far we have come in the past year. Thanks to the tireless efforts and courageous actions of the Iraqi people, Iraq’s political and military leaders, the Iraqi Security Forces, and each of you, a great deal has been achieved in 2007. Thus, as we enter a new year, we and our Iraqi partners will have important accomplishments and a newfound sense of hope on which we can build.

As always, all or your leaders, our fellow citizens back home, and I deeply appreciate the dedication, professionalism, commitment, and courage you display on a daily basis. It remains the greatest of honors to serve with each of you in this critical endeavor.

Sincerely,

David H. Petraeus

Tom Barnett: The Monks of War

The Monks of War appeared in Esquire magazine on February 12, 2007:

If official Washington has trouble learning from its mistakes, the generals fighting the war in Iraq have no such luxury. And there are many lessons to learn.

By Thomas P.M. Barnett

Of all the lessons he's learned in this war, the most important one to Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis is this: Winning this war is mostly about not losing friends along the way. In the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, General Mattis was charged with setting up an air base in Pakistan to make the movement of marines into the theater possible. To clear the way for the airstrip, he flew to Islamabad and sat down with the Pakistani joint headquarters staff, a meeting that was mostly taken up with a litany of offenses the Americans had committed against the Pakistanis. "It started with the shoot-down of Francis Gary Powers, who flew out of Peshawar, and goes on about how many times our country has screwed theirs," says Mattis.

"Finally, after three hours, I said, `I surrender. I am going to Afghanistan. Now, are you going to help me or not?'

"I said, `I want to bring the ships in next to the beach. I want to land stuff across the beach. I have an airstrip nearby where I can fly stuff in and out. I want an intermediate support base where I can put some fuel. And by the way, here is H-hour, D day, and my objective.' The Pakistanis knew it all three weeks in advance and never revealed one word."

But in Pakistan at the time, Osama bin Laden was polling much better than George W. Bush, and the Pakistanis had problems with Mattis's plan.

"They said, `No, you don't get that place, but we will give you this one. If you can get ten miles over the sand dunes, you can use this civilian airstrip. You can hide your gear in the daytime. We will put troops around it and guard it.' They could not admit publicly that they were doing this. If we can't go in and not create repercussions, if we can't be sensitive to that, if we cannot tread lightly on our friends to reassure them, then there would have been secondary explosions."

So the operation would have to be totally invisible, operating by moonlight. By day, a normal beach and a dinky desert airstrip. By night, the landing of a major invasion force and the beginning of Washington's global war on terrorism. Mattis's boss at the time, Navy Admiral William Moore, took the highly unusual step of giving the marine officer command of a naval task force--that is, a bunch of navy ships--and Mattis went to work: "We bring the ships in after dark. We land across the beaches, and when the sun came up, there was just the waves washing some tire tracks away. [The Pakistani government] even brought newsmen down who said they were helping us. They said, `Look, there are no Americans on the beach.'

"At night I brought the ships back in, and night after night we hid the stuff in the sand dunes. And in would come KC-130's, Air Force C-17's, to pick us up and fly into Afghanistan. We just kept moving against the enemy, and it worked like a champ. You know, the Chinese say that if you drink the water, you ought to thank the guy who dug the well. . . . If we had gone in there and screwed Pakistan, then we lose."

Presidents and secretaries of defense call the big shots, but it's the generals who turn the cranks--and suffer the consequences. If in this global war on terrorism the White House has been slow to learn lessons, reluctant to admit mistakes, and incompetent at adapting to changing realities, those prosecuting the war, those living and dying it, have no such luxury.

Now three years in Iraq, the commanders whose job it is to actually fight the "thinking enemy," ever-changing and increasingly sophisticated, have had to adapt on the ground to survive. What, exactly, have they learned?

Two very important lessons from which all other lessons flow, it seems. First, that the strategic concepts that have kept America safe no longer apply in this new war. In the cold war, the United States had a strategic triad of nuclear missiles that could be delivered from the air, the ground, and the sea, and that threat to devastate the Soviet Union was how we deterred the East from ever launching war against the West.

But that security is gone in a global war on terrorism. What country would we blow up with nukes if Al Qaeda killed ten thousand people in the Mall of America next week? This profound realization meant that strategy for the basic defense of the country had to be reconceived.

Second, this is going to be a long war. In the two dozen interviews conducted with top American military officials for this article, the overwhelming consensus is that the boys are not coming home, that these conflicts will not be ending anytime soon. In fact, the generals have taken to calling Washington's war on terrorism the Long War.

This vision has huge implications for the U. S. military as a whole, but especially for the Army, which has long viewed war as an episodic, high-intensity event followed by a lengthy period of peace, during which the force can recover and regenerate its strength for the next fight. The Long War features no such downtime, nor opponents who array themselves as our Army has for the past century: frontline troops at the ready and reserve units at significantly lower states of readiness--especially in terms of equipment.

In the Long War, then, the Army faces a dramatically new requirement not unlike that long managed by the U. S. Navy--the ability to keep a significant portion of its force deployed overseas continuously (as opposed to simply garrisoned in places like South Korea or Germany).

So when the Army chief of staff, General Pete Schoomaker, put his service on the path of this Long War, it meant he suddenly had to bring the entire Army up to frontline status, addressing what were suddenly huge shortfalls in equipment. It also meant that he had to completely reconceive of the Army as a fighting force.

The Army's ten active-duty divisions have for a century been structured like mini-armies unto themselves, full of all sorts of particular combat and support brigades. The only way to send over competently arrayed troops was to deploy entire divisions at a time, and that simply won't work in a Long War.

So Schoomaker made a decision immediately after becoming Army chief of staff in the summer of 2003. Just as the invasion of Iraq was completed and the American occupation was beginning, he decided to reformat the entire U. S. Army and its reserve components over the next several years, turning divisions into mere command units and "modularizing" the entire force so that each brigade will soon be largely interchangeable with all others, allowing divisions to deploy overseas with mix-and-match brigades, all of which are self-sustaining combat teams containing all the same supporting units that previously were aggregated only at the division level.

And as the war became the occupation, Schoomaker and others realized something else: The military processed its lessons learned from combat experience at an excessively leisurely pace, given the new global security environment. "Lessons learned" commands would become a top priority, and three generals, one Marine and two Army, would be brought back from Iraq to teach soldiers what they need to know to fight wars of the future. In the past, such lessons would prove valuable only to soldiers of the next war; this time, in this Long War, casualties could be great, so it would be the goal of these generals to learn these lessons and have them reflected in the training almost on a daily basis.

Each had already learned his own hard lessons in Iraq. William Wallace conquered Baghdad but likewise oversaw its disastrous looting. David Petraeus worked the sheikhs well enough but let a horrifically efficient insurgency build on his watch. James Mattis didn't lose a sailor or marine during his nation-building stint in the south, only to send a host of marines to their death in Falluja.

So all of these lessons would be born of failure. All cost blood.

In 1983, American ground forces invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, with pitiful results. The services of our mighty military machine didn't have the foggiest idea how to fight alongside one another, and if the Grenadans had offered any greater resistance than a few Cuban soldiers and the island's constabulary force, we might have lost. This embarrassment triggered the progressive integration of the four services' combat operations, or the concept now known as jointness.

The war in Iraq has been and will continue to be a similar cause for self-examination by the American military. As General Mattis says, "Success is a poor teacher."


The Teacher

In his office at Training and Doctrine Command along the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, General William "Scotty" Wallace looks like a figure in a historical diorama, his walls covered with large canvases depicting the history of the U. S. Cavalry. Wallace likes to describe himself as just an "old, dumb cavalry guy." But Wallace isn't dumb, and he doesn't ride a horse. Instead, he is famous within the ranks for two twenty-first-century accomplishments: commanding the first Army infantry division to go fully digital (the 4th ID), and then commanding that division in its first war as V Corps commander in Iraq, leading the "Thunder Run" to Baghdad early in the war. Just returned from Iraq in summer 2003, Wallace was placed in command of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he initiated widespread changes to how the battlefield experience directly influenced training, only to be elevated in 2005 from that three-star post to the top schoolhouse job in the Army, the four-star commander of Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia.

Wallace, fifty-nine, is a big guy who fills out his digitally designed desert camouflage, and he speaks slowly, like a field officer developing the situation upon contact with the enemy, describing carefully his view of a commander-centric Army that takes advantage of information networks while not becoming captive to them: "I think that for those of us that have been in the fight, we recognize that the technical solutions only enable the individual soldier and small unit to do his business a little bit better. But there aren't any precision-guided squads.

"The business we're doing--the really complex stuff that's going on on the battlefield today--requires the kid on the ground to know what his boss is thinking; it requires the boss to know what the kid is seeing; it requires those who have seen the same sort of situation in different parts of the world to share it with those who might be seeing it for the first time. And it requires that those who are being presented with it for the first time are presented with it at our training centers, as opposed to in contact with the enemy."

During the cold war, the Army did not have operational experiences of the sort that could inform its preparation for major combat with the Soviet bloc, so the live-fire exercises at places like Fort Irwin, California, and Fort Polk, Louisiana, served as the major source for what you might reasonably describe as "hypothetical" lessons learned from battles that were never waged against an enemy that today no longer exists.

While at Leavenworth, within days of his return from Baghdad, Wallace set himself to a significant restructuring of the Combined Arms Center to systematize the process of feeding the Army's lessons learned from ongoing combat operations into its worldwide collection of training centers.

The Army's decision to reform its lessons-learned operations meant that the combat-training centers would immediately switch from war-gaming against a Soviet-style, tank-heavy "world-class opposition force" to something far more complex, or what the officers now call the Complex Operating Environment. Wallace wanted his training simulations to account for the local populations soldiers would encounter. Role players were added to the training centers by the hundreds. Now when you run a live-fire exercise at Fort Irwin, you have Iraqis yelling at you, you'll hear the call to prayer from mosques five times a day, you'll need to work your translators more than your trigger fingers. You'll face IEDs, not artillery, technicals, not tanks, massed crowds instead of massed troops, and you will be graded on it all, mister.

While commanding at Leavenworth, Wallace seized the available technology, married it to the wealth of information that was streaming in from the battlefield, and had his Combat Studies Institute create virtual battle theaters called Virtual Staff Rides, in which computer simulations allow students a you-are-there perspective of Iraq's many combat experiences.

It has long been the tradition of the Army to take young commanders out to historic battlefields like Shiloh or Gettysburg, narrate the battle, point out the movements of men and materiel, giving the students a chance to view the very terrain upon which the battles occurred and examine the decision-making of the commanders involved. These outings are called staff rides, and compared with Wallace's virtual staff rides, they are literally a walk in the park.

You'd expect the virtual staff ride recounting Wallace's thunder run to Baghdad. But Wallace also demanded a VSR that recounts the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. And the mistaken shooting of the Italian journalist's car as it approached a U. S. military checkpoint. And the Sadr City uprising. None of these offer the same grandeur of a lecture at Little Round Top in Gettysburg, but commanders need to learn from that entire "complex operating environment," not just the battles they'd prefer to remember. In this training, Wallace wants the Army to confront its ugliest recent failures, making it that much harder to repeat them.

The virtual staff ride that Wallace ordered up re-creating the push to Baghdad and the early occupation features twenty-four "stands," or terrain set pieces, that computer-simulation developers sought to capture in every possible detail, right down to how tall that tree was just to the left of the highway overpass or how much garbage was piled up along the road. One modeler bragged that his team had spent days getting the trash to look just right in one scene.

Once the Army's modelers achieve that sort of fidelity to the scene, students in a classroom setting can apply a God's-eye view to the entire proceedings, navigating around the virtual space much like any stick jockey moves around in a video game. It's the kind of rich, high-bandwidth simulation that younger officers will naturally expect, having been raised on a generation of elaborate and immersive games.

At Leavenworth, the experimental virtual-staff-ride course on Iraq is taught over ten weeks, and it's been described by students as one of the best predeployment tools offered there. The post-war phase is the one for which the Army has historically trained its commanders least, leaving far too many in the dark for what comes after the "kinetics" stop. A virtual staff ride on the horrible mistakes of Abu Ghraib helps your average commander to, in Wallace's words, "look beyond the end of the rifle."


The Nation Builder

Wallace's replacement at Leavenworth is arguably the Army general whose star is rising most rapidly on the basis of his performance in Iraq, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who led the 101st Airborne Division in northern and central Iraq during the first difficult postwar year and then assumed leadership of the coalition effort to rebuild Iraq's security forces. With his Princeton Ph.D. in international relations, Petraeus is the closest thing the Army has to its own Lawrence of Arabia, a comparison he does little to discourage, as he seems to identify with the British colonel's experiences in the region during the First World War and the enduring wisdom of his advice to those military officers caught in similarly trying circumstances (Lawrence's legendary book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom), which Petraeus appears to know by heart.

David Petraeus is sitting hunched over on a long leather couch directly beneath a towering portrait of Douglas MacArthur, military overlord of post-World War II Japan, and he's telling his one-thing-leads-to-another story of how he ended up being in charge of an astonishing amount of the postwar rebuilding of Iraq.

One of the first challenges Petraeus faced while occupying much of northern and central Iraq--including the huge Al Anbar province--with the 101st Airborne in the spring of 2003 was the small matter of there being no government there whatsoever. Sudden, unanticipated problem, usually not the preserve of generals: How to get the local government to continue paying its workers. The acting governor of Al Anbar pointed Petraeus in the direction of a central bank manager, who, it just so happened, had set aside a substantial sum of Iraqi currency for just such a post-invasion occasion. Problem was, this banker felt he had no authority in a post-Saddam environment, because his entire career he hadn't sneezed without first asking permission from Baghdad. So he said to Petraeus, "You have the authority." Petraeus thought about that and said, "You're right, I do!"

"So I pull out a piece of two-star stationery--generic government--and he said, `Give me an order.' And I said, `Okay, I will.' To the bank manager: `You are to pay the salaries of government workers in the Al Anbar province.' I signed it and gave it to him, and he said, `Okay, I got it.' And then he said, `But no stamp.' But we had a notary seal because my lawyer was with me, and the next day the aide went out and he got this wonderful stamp with lots of stars and stuff, and we stamped everything."
But a problem solved on day one only generates a new problem for day two: "That night, in the middle of the night, I wake up. Oh, man! Economics 101: If you dump more money on a fixed amount of goods in a marketplace, all you do is produce inflation! So how do we get more goods into the marketplace?"

So back to the governor's office. Petraeus said, "Governor, you've got a problem." But the governor was smart enough to answer back, "General, we've got a problem." So Petraeus said, "Okay, good, let's work on it together."

So the two of them pulled out a map, "and we look at all the different trade routes, if you will. There's one from Turkey, but I know that crossing is jam-packed. Iran--the crossings are very rugged. So the eyes are on Syria."

The general worked with his lawyers, investigated the various UN sanctions, Googled this and that overnight, and by the next morning he had instructions ready to give the battalion commander who was working the border with Syria. This poor guy had to set up border guards, produce agreements with local leaders, whatever surviving government officials he could find, the head of this tribe, the sheikh of that region. Oh, and he had to hire a bunch of everybody's people to keep them all happy. Petraeus then gave his battalion commander a deadline for wrapping this whole package: three days. "Three days from then, I was going to fly out with the governor, and we were going to have a big feast and were going to sign this thing and reopen the border, so we had to deliver the bacon," he says.

Was it written down in any Phase IV plan that the 101st would get in the business of running government payroll or playing customs agent? Not exactly. But if you're an Army officer who's going to pass through Dave Petraeus's Command and General Staff College in the coming years, you will learn how to do all that and more. You will step into nation building like a twenty-first-century Douglas MacArthur.

Petraeus doesn't resemble MacArthur in the slightest. In fact, he looks more like the real Colonel T. E. Lawrence, not the too-beautiful version played by Peter O'Toole in the movies. Like Lawrence, Petraeus is a little bit on the plain side, and he's short like Lawrence, with the slightly stooped posture of a hardcore long-distance runner who simply can't give it up despite his fifty-three years.

With a tour in Bosnia and then two and a half years in Iraq, the general has experience in nation building and post-conflict stabilization operations that is without peer in the U. S. military.

A Washington Post article in November 2005 described Petraeus's recall from Iraq as akin to Jefferson Davis deciding to pull General Robert E. Lee from the field of battle early in the Civil War, lest he suffer burnout. Senator John McCain was quoted in the article as calling the rotation of senior officers back from Iraq "deeply unwise." As he declared in a speech, "If these were the best men for the task, they should still be on the job."

But Petraeus thought his stateside reassignment made sense, and he now sees it as his job to replicate himself for the Long War. People burn out if you leave them out there too long. And, more important to realize, two to three years straight overseas on deployment is going to kill your officer corps. In World War II, very few American officers actually put in that length of time, except in the Pacific. And that was when the country was totally at war. Try that with an all-volunteer force and you'll start seeing some of your best officers retire before putting their families through that, something that Petraeus has already seen happen: "I was only home six or eight months during my son's four years of high school because I did a year in Bosnia prior to Iraq. I am not whining or anything--I got a wife who's an army brat. Her dad went off to Vietnam for two years. She's used to it, she can handle it, but you can't do this institutionally, because I don't think there are that many families who will stand for it. There are cases already, I think, of even senior leaders who are being told they're going back or being offered to go back, and they decide they don't want to do it. It's a combination of wife, little kids--it's a variety of things."

With Petraeus talking about families and little kids, it's possible to forget that he's also the commander who killed Uday and Qusay Hussein. And that here at Leavenworth, he presides over the Jedi Knights, which is the nickname given to the students of the college's elite School of Advanced Military Studies--sort of the Army's version of Top Gun. These are the guys whom the generals turn to when they want to take down some Death Star. It was the Jedi Knights who helped draw up General Norman Schwarzkopf's famous "left hook" into Iraq. In fact, the Jedi fraternity has had a planning cell in every major overseas operation since then.

But Petraeus's eyes burn brightest when he talks about building a new kind of commander, a man or woman who can handle the stresses and strains of Iraq and still have the presence of mind to find solutions other than the trigger.

One of the training tools Petraeus is most proud of is his Combat Leader Environment, basically a PC-based version of a pop-up shooting-gallery drill in which commanders are presented with complex decision points in a postwar-stabilization operation, and they're forced to make impossible choices, which are then broken down for them by a senior officer who acts as mentor during the drill. The purpose, as Petraeus describes it, "is to get his blood pressure up and do it repeatedly--get those high-pressure moments so you get used to it, doing nonkinetic stuff, talking it out, working with the sheikhs, with political leaders, with Iraqi security forces, Afghan forces, and so on."

Petraeus is realistic about how hard it is to teach these sorts of command skills inside the Army. More than once in Iraq, he was confronted by subordinate officers who thought their job was "leading every raid every night, then sleeping until two, lifting weights, then doing it again." So Petraeus had to make it clear to these guys that if they wanted their careers to go anywhere, they needed to start producing broader results. "It's the hard work of drinking tea with the locals, delivering air conditioners to the mosques, meeting with the neighborhood clerics, getting to know the imams, and all the rest of that," he says. "You gotta build institutions, not just units."

And so Petraeus also has his own version of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which in his case number thirteen. It's a simple PowerPoint package of thirteen slides of lessons learned in the war. Number one is, Lawrence had it right. By this he means: It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them. Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh would readily recognize Petraeus's other pillars as eternal truths: Armies of liberation have half-lives. Money is ammunition. Intelligence is the key. Cultural awareness is a force multiplier. Success depends on local leaders.

That last one seems to be the most important to Petraeus. So when the Iraqi leaders of Mosul came to him as commander of the 101st Airborne in the first months of the postwar occupation asking for his help in getting the city's university back up and running, Petraeus didn't hesitate. He had helicopter assault troops available, so Petraeus told them, "Hey, you won the lottery. You're going to rebuild Mosul University." The place had been completely looted and was a shambles, but a month or so later, a Big Ten-sized university was holding classes in Mosul, finishing out the school year a little late, with American helo pilots filling in as college administrators.

That follows with the main lesson General Petraeus has learned from Iraq: "Everyone does nation building."


The Quick Thinker

Another disciple of Lawrence's is the articulate and casually profane Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis, combat commander in both Afghanistan and Iraq and arguably the only Marine general whose length and breadth of service in Southwest Asia rivals that of Petraeus. Mattis, who suffers the usual marine trait of speaking candidly in public settings, once confessed at a defense conference that "it's fun to shoot some people," referring to the Taliban in Afghanistan. But he is far more famous within the ranks as a warrior monk who assiduously studies both war and peace in all of their complexities and demands no less from his subordinates.

Mattis, fifty-five, returned from Iraq in the summer of 2004 to take over the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia, making him the Corps's point man in collaborating with Wallace and Petraeus in processing lessons learned from the global war on terrorism.

Mattis is an impatient man. Stuck in a classic desk job, he tackles it with gusto, poring over reports and reading every damn book that comes across his table. Still, he can't stand the routine: "All we do is read hundreds of e-mails every fucking day, and we go to meetings and spend six hours making no decisions, and we talk about jointness as if it's some church we must bow to, and then we walk out of there and we've done nothing."

It's not that Mattis doesn't value downtime, because he does, noting that T. E. Lawrence did his best thinking when he was incapacitated with illness. "We're all very vigorous," he says. "Oh, we're vigorous as hell. But our next original thought, in many cases, will be our first."

When Mattis got to Quantico in August 2004, he was unhappy with what he saw: "I went to the entry-level training of the Marine Corps, and I was not satisfied that a couple of years into this war we were adapting fast enough."

For Mattis, adapting faster includes de-briefing anyone who's seen action, sometimes catching them sucking air through a tube in an intensive-care unit. He pushed his lessons-learned guys to aggressively interview grievously wounded marines at Bethesda Naval Hospital, figuring they'd certainly not be shy about pointing out tactical failures that might have gotten them hurt.

One wounded officer quickly pointed out that the Marines needed to redesign their crowd-control training so that it focused more on letting Iraqi personnel engage in the usual "troop and stomp" tactics--i.e., lining up soldiers in various wedge formations and having them slowly "stomp" their way into unruly crowds--while the marines needed to hold back and provide tank support. Mattis, who controls Marine training, responded swiftly, directing the change at the Twentynine Palms combat-training center in California. "So based upon a lesson learned, in twenty-four hours the training was changed out there. We took the time and did more tank and infantry training. I want that kind of agility."

Quantico did have a center for lessons learned before Mattis arrived, but all the data flowed in and not much flowed out. Mattis wanted it flowing out like a river during flood season. If the Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned learned it, the general wanted it on the unclassified, password-accessed Web site within hours. Now 85 percent of what the MCCLL reports out appears on the unclassified Web.

Mattis isn't interested in running some worldwide chat room for marines to trade war stories. Everything is moderated, cataloged, searchable. By starting relatively late down this pathway, the Marines have been able to cherry-pick from the other services' online knowledge systems, and it's clear that the Marines owe a lot to the Army Knowledge Online system that Wallace greatly expanded during his time at Leavenworth.

Mattis served with Wallace, and he's had multiple career overlaps with Dave Petraeus, both in the Pentagon and in Iraq. These guys trade best practices and new technologies like next-door neighbors who've known one another for years, setting in motion a level of Army-Marine cooperation that is unprecedented, such as the upcoming publication of the Counterinsurgency Operations field manual that Leavenworth and Quantico will "dual-designate" as official for both services. The document draws the battle lines for the Long War, which it describes as "a protracted politico-military struggle" in which "political power is the central issue," not territorial conquest. Army and Marine officers will take pains to tell you that most of this fight is "nonkinetic," meaning that the new doctrine calls for a battle waged mostly by other means, such as political and economic development efforts designed to weaken the insurgency's claim that the government is illegitimate. In this view, the way to beat an insurgency is ultimately by creating "stakeholders" among the populace. The Counterinsurgency field manual is a Wallace-Mattis-Petraeus special that bonds the Army and Marines with Tampa's Special Operations Command in what General Pete Schoomaker calls America's twenty-first-century strategic triad.

This level of close cooperation is cats-and-dogs-living-together weird. And it's only going to get weirder, because the soldiers and marines serving from here on out will have grown up entirely in a Web-based world, where no stone goes un-Googled. You provide them open-source environments to network their thinking or they'll create their own chat rooms, something plenty of young marines and Army officers did in Iraq, Companycommand.com and s3-xonet.army.mil being the most famous.

So what are the Army and Marines to do with this Nintendo generation? Mattis invites those electronic forums inside the wire, so to speak. He legitimizes them. And then he lets the students teach the instructors on counterinsurgency, because right now that's where the bulk of the experience lies--with the operating force. As Colonel Monte Dunard, director of the MCCLL, says, "We don't want to be making changes fifteen years down the road. We got guys dying today. We want them to be trained better--how do we get this information faster, quicker, more relevant?"

The Marines are doing this on a daily basis: deciding on which semiautomatic sniper rifle works best, figuring out better ways to attach fuel hoses during dust storms, the latest tricks for dealing with IEDs and convoy attacks--an issue of greatest priority. When the Marines went into Iraq, no one foresaw that years into an occupation, so many ground troops would still be dying in insurgency attacks against convoys in what troops call "Injun Country." So convoy personnel are now trained in how to call in air support while on the move, how to shoot back while on the move, how to do a medical evacuation on the move, and how to handle a roadside bomb on the move. The MCCLL's software tracks all of this, zeroing in on the phrases "we need" and "the Marine Corps should" whenever and wherever they're uttered.

The Army and Marines can't be in the business right now of deducing from distant, abstract, future war scenarios what their troops need today in terms of equipment, training, or doctrine. They need to calculate those requirements from today's complex operating environment, and the flash-to-bang time needs to be as short as possible. Let the Navy and Air Force fantasize about war with the Chinese. "I find it intellectually embarrassing that people want to hug the Chinese," Mattis says. " `Oh, thank God we have another peer competitor at last! Now we can go back to building the weapons that we always wanted to build.' That's so embarrassing."

Instead, Mattis's staff is full of officers just back from Iraq, and they're all eager to make the Marines the shortest flash-to-bang learning organization there is. "All I have to do is create the expectation that it will happen," he says. "It's commander's intent. They understand my intent is we don't sit here and admire this and say, `Let's hold our breath and get through this, then we get back to proper soldiering by planning for China twenty years from now.' Fuck that. If we fight China in the future, we will also find IEDs and people using the Internet. If we go to Pyongyang and we're fighting there six months from now against a mechanized unit, one hundred thousand Special Forces would be running around doing what they're doing to our rear area now. So guess what? This is the best training ground in the world. For the German troops it was Spain, right? Well, Iraq is ours."

So that's the intellectual struggle Mattis is now waging from his desk at Quantico, institutionalizing his flash-to-bang mentality, with this as his mantra: Anything our enemies can dream up, we can counter faster.

To wit: While doing stability operations in the Shiite-heavy south immediately following Saddam's fall, Mattis was confronted with fiery Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's rapid trajectory toward insurgency kingpin. One day when al-Sadr was trying to pull together a mass meeting of his followers for another of his stem-winders, the kind that eventually launched his bloody uprising, Mattis cut him off at the pass, or, more specifically, at the bus station. Knowing that the cleric would use buses to bring followers into his urban stronghold from outside, Mattis hired as many buses in the region as he could get his hands on. "So when he went to contract his buses, they were gone," Mattis says. "Didn't have to shoot a single person. We sent the buses out for a trip--empty there, empty back. A waste of money? It was the best money I ever spent."

Contributing editor Thomas P. M. Barnett is a strategic consultant who served in the Office of Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2003; he is the author of Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating.

Cool thing of the day: Canon in D on electric guitar

Like most everyone, I'm a fan of Pachelbel's Canon in D. Thanks to Tigerhawk, I watched this cool rendition of Canon in D on electric guitar:



The artist gives his name as funtwo on Youtube. His real name is Jeong-Hyun Lim. On a related note, the story of JerryC and funtwo is an open-source lesson about the viral nature of this evolving thing we call globalization.

BONUS - JerryC's original rendition:




Eric

More craziness by high-achieving women

Why do I say "craziness by high-achieving women", rather than use a more gender-neutral title? Because in the vein of ex-Army psychiatrist Cecilia Chen and ex-NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak, both high-achieving military women who tried to kill the current mates of their ex-lovers, I'm talking about women of similar descriptions again boggling the public mind with similar outlandish criminal acts.

This time, I'm referring to Teri Rhodes and Kathryn McCoy. They're both young, by all accounts exemplary, student-athletes who were arrested for infanticide in August and October of this year. Rhodes, an 18-year-old sophomore, was a scholarship volleyball player at Mercyhurst College near Erie, Pennsylvania. McCoy, a 19-year-old sophomore, was a scholarship golfer at Bellarmine College near Lexington, Kentucky. They brought their pregnancies to term while somehow keeping them secret from everyone around them, even through mandatory sports-related doctor's exams, while living with roommates, and while participating in their respective collegiate sports until days before giving birth. Upon giving birth in the bathrooms of their student living quarters (campus apartment in Rhodes' case; dorm in McCoy's case), they murdered their newborn babies, both girls, and attempted to hide the fact their daughters ever existed.

Awful. To repeat myself, what the hell? I don't get it.

Eric

Thoughts of the day

Do not go gentle into that good night
by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Harry Burns: I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

"Justice for Cecilia" website

Check out justiceforcecilia.org, a website advocating for convicted psychiatrist, Cecilia Chen.

Eric

What's a successful war?

[Note: I posted this in the Postsecret chat forum.]

quite_aware wrote:

Terrible. I know that its something the government must do, to fight a successful war. But what does that mean anyway?
No war is a true success. Especially this one.

True. We can't know until years, even decades, after a war whether it was a success or not. In the current Long War or Global War on Terror, we're only in the middle of the beginning. Way too early to know what will come of it, even accounting for the sped up digital information age.

At its essence, war is civilizational change. The war process, when viewed out of context, is a destructive process. When war is viewed in context, we can see that what we understand as historical success, or victory, is largely determined in the peace-building constructive process that flows from war. War only determines who has dominant control; it's up to the victor to grow peace and civilization from the rubble of the battle. Usually, the peace-building 'post-war' is longer, more complicated and difficult, wearisome and more expensive than the war itself. For example, we learn in school that the Civil War ended in 1865 with the formal surrender of the Confederacy. But think about it: how long and hard was the the short-term and long-term aftermath? The upheavals of Reconstruction, the loss of patience for Reconstruction that led to the compromise between North and South settling upon the Jim Crow South, and the wars, migrations and disruption of economy that eventually culminated in the Civil Rights movement a hundred!! years later. Some would say even today we're not finished with the post-war of the Civil War yet.

Today, the Vietnam War continues to have a profound effect on our society, how we view war, and has provided to our enemies an effective blueprint of our weaknesses. With WW2, we still have large contingents of troops in Europe and Asia providing post-war security and stability. In Korea, where I served in the 90s, the 1950-53 Korean War that utterly devastated an already war-torn country actually began 5 years after the post-WW2 transitional occupation began, and we still don't know the outcome for greater Korea, although we should all be justifiably proud of the social, economic, and political evolution that has taken place in South Korea during our stay there. (Since WW2, when we've been war victors, we've been pretty good post-war peace-builders, too.)

The interesting thing about the current Long War is the lack of simply distinct phases, in the sense of major combat separate from security and stabilization, and nation-building. In traditional war, like WW2, you can have distinct phases. In an insurgency war, the phases twist around each other. Our military is acting as a humanitarian aid agency, like the Peace Corps on steroids, in Iraq and Afghanistan, while simultaneously acting as a diplomatic force, police force, and war-fighting force. I don't know how the heck our soldiers are able to do it all, but they're doing it. Our military has progressed impressively considering that when 9/11 happened, we didn't know how to do a full-spectrum counter-insurgency - which explains why our enemy uses an insurgency strategy (d'uh!). But just as our enemy has evolved (and war is highly evolutionary), we have evolved, too, just in a slower, more cumbersome, disrupted (read: politicized) fashion. After years of stubbornly trying to avoid it (read: Rumsfeld), we finally have a true counter-insurgency leader, GEN Petraeus, leading a legitimate counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq. If we can succeed in Iraq, we'll finally have solid grounding for fighting and defeating the enemy's global insurgency strategy.

Before his assassination, JFK wanted us to become proficient at counter-insurgency, because he foresaw insurgency as the greatest threat to a liberal world order. The Vietnam War derailed JFK's vision and, as a result, our modern enemy holds the initiative. Hopefully, George Bush Jr and his successor, be s/he Democratic or Republican, will finally establish as institutional doctrine the counter-insurgency force that JFK tried to start last century.

Maybe because we all grew up learning about the glory of past generations' traditional wars, and learned revulsion for insurgency wars (eg, big part of Vietnam, Somalia, Rwanda), it's harder for many of us to understand and accept what's going on in our generation's war.

Here's a good web-resource for us to catch up: Small War Journals.

Eric

Anxiety advice

[Note: I posted a slightly different version in the Postsecret chat forum.]

When wrongness, pointlessness, hopelessness, despair, and helplessness saturate your mind, how can you rely upon your infected mind to fix itself?

My best advice is that there is no magic solution. You need to develop techniques, tactics, procedures, and a strategy to fight and win against your anxiety every time it attacks you. It will continue to do so, because your anxiety is a hardwired part of you.

Accept that it's possible you'll never conquer your anxiety in a movie-like final showdown. Like any disorder that's hardwired into your mind, eg, addictions or schizophrenia (I just re-watched Beautiful Mind on TV), you can win battles, but you'll never win the war. The best you can do is to assess the battle correctly every time you fight it. You'll have to fight the battle against your anxiety over and over and over again. The alternative is to relax, surrender to it, and accept your life being driven into a cave by your anxiety.

Keys:

1. Breed confidence in your abilities and potential. Anxiety is linked to fear of failure, harm, and humiliation. Therefore, it's important to attempt challenges to prove to yourself that your abilities and potential are good enough - not necessarily the best, but good enough. Once you conquer some challenges, you will own tested bulwarks to use as rational weapons against your anxiety when it wells up irrationally from inside your mind to swamp you. For example, I enlisted in the Army specifically because I believed the military was the last thing in the world I could do. By serving well and honorably, I proved to myself I could succeed at something I fully believed I would fail. After I served, I earned my degree at an Ivy League university in order to gain more tangible proof of my worth.

Unfortunately, a good track record isn't a magic solution. It's merely a good weapon to use in the never-ending war against your anxiety. Talented, intelligent anxiety sufferers often live with an odd mix of disembodied confidence in their own abilities, while simultaneously, their confidence in self is sabotaged by their anxiety. People on the outside, who only see the quality but not the anxiety, don't understand why anxiety sufferers seemingly irrationally undermine themselves for no apparent reason.

2. Learn that regret is worse than failure. Is it worse to try your best and spectacularly fail, or to quietly give up and forever wonder "what if"? For me, I learned the hard way that "what if" is worse than real-life failure, and it's a lot harder to make up for those regrets later in life. It's best to avoid regrets, if possible. Convince yourself that regret is worse than failure. If your anxiety is successful using the fear of failure against you, then co-opt the proven power of fear - make your fear of regret stronger than your fear of failure. Use your fear of regret to push you forward into the hot light of the arena, even while your fear of failure tries to pull you back into the tempting cool shadows of the cave.

Failure is a part of the struggle of life. It sucks for everyone, and even talented people who aren't anxiety sufferers fail. In fact, most iconic role models will tell you that their eventual breakthrough success grew out of a mixed history of failure and success. The key is they used failure to their tactical advantage and did not give in to their fears.

3. Demystify failure and use it to your tactical advantage. Overcoming your anxiety to challenge yourself is a victory in and of itself, but it doesn't mean you will automatically win at the challenge. That was another hard lesson for me to learn. In real life, the scrappy underdog doesn't always get the girl. You may even do your best and work as hard as you can, and still lose. Failure hurts, but you will find that real failure can be constructive, whereas anxiety is empty and only destructive. Real failure teaches you valuable lessons about yourself, other people, and the world around you. Failure allows you to make informed evaluations about your true limits, rather than your anxiety-perceived limits, and helps you decide whether you can improve and do better or you're better off investing your life into something else.

Real failure reveals and teaches, real failure helps you grow and mature. Failure empowers. Fight against your anxiety's attempt to use fear of failure to cheat you from the benefits of real failure.

4. Difficult: identify the healthy fears and separate them from the anxiety fears. It seems to me that living fearlessly isn't altogether healthy, either. Healthy fear is a protective tool of the mind. The problem is that for anxiety sufferers, fear has become malignant, like when someone's immunity system goes haywire and attacks healthy cells. Challenging yourself and embracing failure is one thing. However, recklessly thrusting yourself into bad situations and hurting yourself, and maybe even others, is something else altogether. Unfortunately, it's very hard for anxiety sufferers to trust their distorted judgement to tell the difference between healthy fears and anxiety fears. Sorry I can't give better advice here, because I haven't figured it out yet.

5. As much as we'd like to, we aren't strong enough to battle our inner demons 24/7/365 forever. The struggle against yourself is exhausting. Giving in does lead to relief. It's why addicts "fall off the wagon" even after years of successful sobriety. Compromise, develop pressure releases. Learn who you are. Recognize that relief is with cost and only temporary, so what ground are you willing to concede to your anxiety in order to gain ground in other areas of your life? Where can you pick your spots to rest and relax, so you can rejuvenate for the more important battles, without weakening yourself? That said, don't sell yourself short. Err on the side of strength rather than weakness. Be careful of the slippery slope that easily turns a temporary tactical concession into a larger destructive surrender to your anxiety.

6. Don't alienate trusted loved ones. Easier said than done when your anxiety pulls you into the lonely comfort of the cave, but it's critical to keep trusted loved ones involved in your life. "Trusted" is critical, because you need your loved ones to be a source of strength for you even when they don't understand what's happening to you. My mom has never understood, but still supported me as best she could. When you're battling something that's part of you, you may not even notice the warning signs that you're slipping. If you're lucky, a trusted love one who wants what's best for you, has a sense of your anxiety problem, and can spot the signs may be able to save you even before you've admitted you need help. Your loves ones can help pick you up again after you've lost a battle to your anxiety, too. Bottom-line: resist the urge to isolate yourself; you need the help and support of your trusted loved ones.

7. Psychotropic drugs. I can't say much about them, except they scare me. Some people swear by them, others say meds hurt them without helping. I believe there are physiological roots to the condition so I don't discount drugs, but don't treat them like a magic solution, either.

8. Counseling. I believe a good counselor can help a lot, but my sense is that there are many bad counselors out there, and even with a good counselor, it's not a magic solution. First of all, it's expensive and time consuming. Therapy can take years and it's not a passive process. A counselor can serve as a guide, informed outside perspective, and honest evaluator only, not a repairman. Therapy still requires that you do the heavy lifting. It doesn't solve the problem, only helps train you to better fight your battles.

Final thought. Anxiety is undoubtedly a handicap and a burden. It slows you down, it's relentless, and it can drive you to your knees when you relax. But you know what? Life's not fair. Realize you're not the only person with a handicap and burden. Folks with bad breaks in life do succeed, and you can, too. Deal with it. Fight. Win. Fail. Get up. Fight again.

PS 31May11: Be aware that an anxious and depressed state of mind will color and alter your entire perspective and how you think. So when you are in a "low mood", it is best to be very cautious about decision-making.

PPS 06Dec11: My Bwog comment about Columbia student Tian (Tina) Bu's suicide. Tina fought her illness in a similar way to my advice. The choices are fight or flight. I wonder whether her apparent inability to fight anymore and her refusal to give in to her illness left her only one choice. My advice should be tempered with a realistic assessment of one's own resilience and brittleness. If one cannot fight anymore, then the better choice is to give up and run away rather than commit suicide.

Eric