by John A. Nagl
Major Petraeus was, by then, a speechwriter for General Jack Galvin, the grandly named Supreme Allied Commander Europe, for whom he had worked twice earlier in his career. I literally shared a corner of Petraeus’s small speechwriting desk, drafting a paper on cooperation developing armaments among the countries of NATO and attempting to sample every one of the several hundred beers produced in the small country of Belgium. Demonstrating a reasonable degree of success in both endeavors, I made it into Petraeus’s little black book of officers he might choose to call upon should he get the chance, although I didn’t recognize that he was keeping track of my progress at the time. Major Petraeus was more interested in running than in drinking beer, but two Air Force Academy cadets and, especially, the lone Naval Academy midshipman on the same SHAPE internship filled the drinking buddy gap nicely. SHAPE billeting, which had seen a generation of service academy interns, had thoughtfully provided us with bachelor officer quarters a short 134 steps from the officers’ club. We checked a number of times that summer to make sure neither the club nor the BOQ had moved, and neither ever did.
That summer internship was the cherry on the cake of a fantastic experience at West Point. I’d fallen in love with the place the first time I saw its granite walls appearing to grow out of the hard rock on which George Washington had sited a fort controlling the Hudson River during the Revolutionary War, statues of Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton standing as tall among the buildings as their namesakes did in my imagination. Although I’d intended to follow in my father’s footsteps and become an electrical engineer, being assigned to Dan Kaufman’s mentorship as an impressionable freshman coincided with a crushing defeat in plebe calculus. By the time I had to choose a major, it was international relations and national security that I signed up for, a program perhaps not coincidentally then under the stewardship of Lieutenant Colonel Kaufman.
A full decade later I was back in the Social Sciences department, attempting to provide the same education, mentoring, and role modeling to a new generation of cadets that Petraeus and his cohort had provided to mine under Kaufman’s leadership. Susi and I were living on West Point’s campus in a small apartment with a tiny balcony. We could just squeeze two deck chairs onto it and hold a cutting board on our knees as a sort of dinner table, but the view of the Hudson River from the balcony made the gymnastics worth it. The old, deep river had cut deeply into the granite hills over millennia, creating a point on the western side that forced sailing ships, whichever way the wind was blowing, to slow down to negotiate a ninety-degree turn. West Point’s commanding position over that critical point in the Hudson had led George Washington to fortify the post during the Revolutionary War. He had a great chain strung across the great river, guarded by cannons and colonial insurgents who were determined not to let the British Army practice the classic counterinsurgency technique of slicing the rebellion into smaller, more digestible pieces. West Point held despite Benedict Arnold’s decision (inspired by love of an Englishwoman, always a dangerous choice) to traitorously hand over the plans to its defenses to the British, and today the cannons and a piece of the Great Chain preserved on Trophy Point recall an important episode in the birth of a rebellious nation.
It is a privilege granted to few to return to a beloved alma mater to become part of the fabric of the institution. My cadet dreams of walking in the shoes of Captains Daffron, Parker, and Petraeus came true, and I now stood where giants in my own development had trod. The cohort of officers with whom I taught had its own giants, at least two of whom have already earned their general officer stars, and a large number of whom served with valor in the wars of the decade that would follow our teaching assignment.
Paul Yingling, bloodied but unbowed, brawling.
My closest intellectual comrade in this field was Paul Yingling. Paul had grown up over a bar outside Pittsburgh, enlisted in the Army to better himself, gone to college at Duquesne on an ROTC scholarship, and earned a commission as an artillery officer before fighting in both Desert Storm and Bosnia. At that point the long arm of the Sosh Department found Paul and sent him to the University of Chicago. Paul was razor sharp, and over chess games and debates about international relations theory, we managed to forge a friendship that endures. Paul’s most notable characteristics, other than his intellect, are his stubbornness, his deeply felt sense of integrity, and his love of a good fight; all would be on display on a national stage in the decade to come.
Teaching was a joy; it was easy to see that we Sosh professors, or “p’s,” stood in front of classrooms filled with those who would in their turn become our replacements a decade hence. In those years at the end of a decade of peace, I taught international relations and national security studies and American foreign policy to future heroes Walt Cooper and Jim Golby and Liz Young. Out of the classroom, I helped them compete for Rhodes scholarships so that they too could imbibe warm beer and learn the lessons of empire.
One of the more interesting and certainly the most driven of this group was Craig Mullaney, a working-class kid from Rhode Island with an intense desire to excel. I met Craig during my first year of teaching when he was just a sophomore, a “yearling” in West Point parlance (because juniors had once been sent away from the academy for summer visits to military posts aboard cattle cars and hence were called “cows”). Craig majored in history, and Susi took a seat on his thesis committee and taught him and some of his classmates to cook in our apartment. Craig remembers making a hash of peeling pears because he was using the blunt edge of the knife, a good analogy for the brute-force approach he took to winning a Rhodes himself.
I continued to work on turning my dissertation into a book when not teaching cadets or mentoring those seeking scholarships, learning more about the organizational culture of the U.S. military, and watching the way it affected decisions on the use of force that marked the Clinton presidency. It became increasingly clear that the loss in Vietnam had shaken the confidence of the U.S. military for a generation. Stung by the defeat, the Army decided to turn away from counterinsurgency campaigns to focus on the kinds of war it liked best: conventional campaigns against conventional enemies. A generation of officers, including Colin Powell and Jack Galvin, turned the Army that had known bitter defeat in Vietnam into the military force that triumphed in Desert Storm, but the apparent revitalization of American arms had a hidden underbelly: it intentionally turned away from an entire category of war, with no guarantee that a future enemy would not exploit the gaping hole in America’s military preparedness. It was as if a football team had devoted itself exclusively to defending against the forward pass, tearing up the playbook on run defense, and even deciding not to practice against a “three yards and a cloud of dust” offense.
The overwhelming desire of the Army to avoid future iterations of Vietnam was enshrined in the Powell-Weinberger Doctrine, named after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of defense who in separate speeches promulgated a very restrictive series of rules governing the employment of American military force. The U.S. military would be employed only in wars in which there were clear military targets, strong public support, and a well-defined exit strategy. Lacking those three things, America should not deploy her armed forces.
These restrictions meant not only that the American military was all but unemployable in the messy conflicts that marked the post–Cold War era but also that it was unprepared to fight, if called upon to do so, in wars more politically complicated than Desert Storm. The military got very good at winning battles through training at places like the National Training Center (where most units performed better than mine had when we faced defeat at the hands of the Nanooks, or at least claimed they did in officers’ club discussions afterward). Although the military knew how to win battles, it had no sense of how to use American power to achieve political objectives—to win wars. More than a decade later, retired Army General Jack Keane would tell Jim Lehrer that in Iraq:
We put an Army on t
he battlefield [in Iraq] that I had been a part of for 37 years. It doesn’t have any doctrine, nor was it educated and trained, to deal with an insurgency. . . . After the Vietnam War, we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency, because it had to do with how we lost that war. In hindsight, that was a bad decision.6
That hindsight was yet to arrive while I was teaching at West Point, but the gap in understanding of the relevance of insurgency and counterinsurgency had more immediate implications for my publishing prospects. No one was interested in a book on how armies learn to succeed in counterinsurgency, and both Princeton and Cornell University Presses, leaders in the field of international security, were uninterested in the book that I had titled Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife after Lawrence of Arabia’s eureka-inspiring phrase. I did manage to get a chapter of the dissertation published in the little-read Princeton journal World Affairs. Although I couldn’t get the book published, I presented in that article some of the conclusions—that counterinsurgency was not going away, that the U.S. military had better (re)learn how to do it well, and that it was important to build the ability to learn into modern military organizations—at a political science convention. The ideas were politely received by an audience that had next to no ability to influence actual policy. I also had the chance to coauthor a monograph, with retired Army Colonel Don Snider and fellow Major Tony Pfaff, on the challenges of limited wars to military professionalism. It argued, “If the Army continues to resist organizing training and equipping itself to fight and win the wars it is currently being asked to fight, it may no longer have a sufficiently professional officer corps when the next big war occurs.”
Captains assigned to West Point arrive during one summer and are brought up to speed in a teaching boot camp before the start of the fall semester; then during their second summer, they serve as drill sergeants themselves, mentoring cadets assigned to their own summer training. I was sent to Camp Buckner, a post some fifteen miles from West Point that is known as “the greatest summer of your life” when endured as a yearling and by other aphorisms when assigned there as a captain.
In our little West Point apartment in 1999.
The most memorable part of my second summer at Buckner came during my tour as camp staff duty officer. Susi was visiting her mother in England, and I had brought George the Dog, our pit bull rescue mutt, with me to staff duty. George got away from me and found himself a skunk; although the skunk fared poorly in the encounter, earning a broken neck, it would be hard to argue that George, his eyes swollen shut from the spray, had won the campaign. I made the command decision to abandon my post as staff duty officer to transport George home for a thorough scrubbing, then returned to duty a bit the worse for wear myself. The next morning I reported to the camp commander that I had abandoned my post; he asked me what had led me to make that choice, then before I could answer asked, “What’s that smell?” As a result of my transgression, dogs were prohibited at Camp Buckner—my most important contribution to national security that summer.
My contributions the next summer were more substantial, or at least fought on more complicated battlefields. I worked in the office of the deputy assistant secretary of defense for requirements, plans, and counterproliferation policy, Dr. Jim Miller, whom I had met during my second Oxford tour while he was enjoying a Marshall Fellowship in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan. Jim was a six-foot-four Iowa boy who had played tennis at Stanford and then earned his doctorate at Harvard’s Kennedy School, studying the impact of very deep cuts in nuclear weapons.
During his Marshall Fellowship, Jim had spent two solid hours physically walking me through the University Park while intellectually walking me through my doctoral dissertation in stunningly Socratic fashion. That walk is for me a constant reminder of the value of the right question asked at the right time. Although I was ostensibly writing a paper on the future of arms control for another mentor, former Air Force officer Jim Smith, my real education in Miller’s office was a glimpse into the role played by senior civilian officials in the Pentagon, people who called general officers by their first name. I decided that my future should include service as a Pentagon political appointee with the opportunity to influence national policy on issues of capabilities for waging war and preserving peace.
Officers assigned to West Point as professors generally arrive as captains and are promoted to major during their tenure. Some few are selected for promotion before their year group is promoted in “due course”; these fortunate officers are instead promoted “below the zone,” gaining a head start in the race for general officer stars. I was disappointed not to earn that distinction, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. My decision to spend four of my first ten years in the Army at Oxford studying international security issues and counterinsurgency was made against the express advice of my Army career managers, and if I had been seeking a conventional Army career, their advice would have been exactly right.
My decision to attend West Point more than a decade earlier had been heavily influenced by my father, an Iowan who was part of the first generation of his family to go to college, in his case Marquette, on a Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship. Dad became a small part of Admiral Hyman Rickover’s famous nuclear Navy, enormously proud of being asked to solve a nuclear equation on a blackboard during his brief interview with the great man. Many others were not so lucky, finding themselves locked in closets if their answers failed to satisfy Admiral Rickover, who almost single-handedly created the U.S. Navy’s nuclear propulsion program and its exacting focus on safety.
Dad’s career was far less distinguished than Rickover’s, however, consisting in its entirety of a tour teaching nuclear engineering at Mare Island Naval Base in Vallejo, California, where first I and then my sister Emily were born. Dad left the Navy as soon as he was able, and after brief tours in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin tending nuclear reactors, he ended up in Omaha, Nebraska, which boasted a power plant at Fort Calhoun that became his second home for more than twenty years. It was not being around nuclear power but smoking a pack a day for thirty years that killed him as my final year teaching at West Point came to a close. I flew to Kansas City, where the family had recently moved, and was there at home with him when he died in his own bed, his wife of thirty-five years next to him, all six of his children under the roof. I delivered the eulogy, focussing on the responsibility he had felt to provide for his family physically, leaving out the emotional distance that his own upbringing had instilled in him and that my mother had attempted to bridge on her own.
He left behind a big Cadillac, an inheritance from a friend that Mom had never driven and didn’t want to start driving now. I sat down with her to talk about alternatives, intending to suggest an immensely practical Subaru, when she brightly said that she knew just what she wanted to trade the Caddy for: a new Volkswagen Beetle. I knew immediately that she was going to be just fine on her own, and more than a decade later that little beetle-green Beetle is just touching fifty thousand miles, evidence of many trips to choir practice and occasional visits to her own family in Iowa.
Dad’s illness had prevented me from applying for a White House Fellowship, which would have provided a year working in the executive branch of the U.S. government in Washington. Although Sosh p’s often competed for White House Fellowships at the conclusion of their teaching tours, I couldn’t in good conscience ask to be assigned to Washington at that point. The alternative assignment, to the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, would put me less than an hour from my dying father. As it turned out, cancer took him before we moved to Leavenworth, but being close to Mom in her first year of widowhood was another gift the Army gave me, as was including Paul Yingling in my Leavenworth cohort.
Command and General Staff College (CGSC) was a yearlong course that at that time was reserved for those judged to be in the top half of their year’s group of officers, the cohort who began service
during a certain calendar year. The joke among students was that CGSC consisted of the Army’s top half being taught by its bottom half, since service as an instructor was not highly valued by the Army, but I thought highly of the officers who taught me and enjoyed the classroom exchanges that they led. I was less impressed by the curriculum, which was designed for an army that was fighting replicas of Desert Storm rather than repeatedly engaged in messy fights like Somalia and Bosnia.
CGSC did provide me with time to focus on turning my doctoral thesis into a book, a task still undone three years after completion, now accompanied by those rejection letters from the university presses at Princeton and Cornell. I swallowed my pride and contacted Praeger Press, a trade publisher that I later discovered was rumored to have been funded by the CIA. Many of the books on Vietnam that I cited had been published under Praeger’s imprint, so there was historical continuity, even if Praeger didn’t have the cachet of an academic press that I desired. It was finally accepted for publication, although I spent many more night and weekend hours getting the manuscript into accordance with Praeger’s guidelines for footnotes and bibliography format. The process took longer than I’d ever imagined it could, and it didn’t bear fruit until 2002, when counterinsurgency was about to be in vogue as it had not been since Praeger’s heyday forty years before. I engaged in a bitter struggle with Praeger about the book title, wanting to use Lawrence’s simile. My editors at Praeger refused, insisting on the prosaic Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam on the cover of the book, with Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife relegated to subtitle status.