Knife Fights

by John A. Nagl

  Briefing a mission to Lieutenant Doyle Hufstedler, 2004.

  Late in our year, it was the lieutenants of Apache who suffered. Second Lieutenant Brian Smith was hit by a sniper’s bullet while dismounted next to his tank and killed. Neil Santoriello was killed by an IED placed high on a pole that held a road sign, designed to target a tank commander exposed in his tank hatch ten feet off the ground. Neil was a compact fireplug of a man. I met him while he was waiting to report in to Lieutenant Colonel Swisher on his first day in 1-34, back at Fort Riley. Although I can’t remember why, I know that as a result of our encounter, he was doing push-ups when Jeff came out to shake hands with him. Neil would regularly get down and knock out push-ups when he saw me coming after that, certain that I would find some reason for him to do so. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery not far from Todd; it is reassuring to think of their shades on patrol together, Neil’s tank protecting Todd, in his up-armored Humvee, from harm.

  That deployment was a long, long year. We finally handed over Khalidiyah to an infantry unit that had been pulled out of an assignment in South Korea. Almost unbelievably, the Army was so short of troops by late 2004 that it had to remove units from Korea—a high-priority mission with the motto of “Fight Tonight” against an unstable North Korean regime that could quite literally go ballistic at any time—to meet the demands of the Iraq War. As we prepared to leave, we could point with pride to a better Iraqi police force, an ICDC battalion that was quartered inside Khalidiyah, a better understanding of the insurgency, and a vast number of dead or detained insurgents. Nonetheless, it was hard to argue that we’d won. In fact, in a final insult, the ammunition supply point at Taqquadam Airfield, from which many of us (including me) were scheduled to fly out after sector handover, was hit by a mortar round the night before our scheduled departure in what was clearly an inside job. The aim point was so precise that it detonated the entire ammo dump, raining down still-live munitions on the airfield and keeping us in Iraq for a week longer than we’d planned, until the mess was cleaned up and our airplane could take off from the damaged runway.

  It somehow seemed an appropriate farewell. When we returned to Fort Riley, one of the battle captains had coffee mugs made that proclaimed, “IRAQ 2003–2004: We Were Winning When I Left.”

  But we weren’t, and we knew it. Now I was about to get the rare opportunity to find out if Washington understood that we weren’t winning, and why, and if anyone there had any idea what to do about it. I wasn’t optimistic. It would turn out that the fight in the Pentagon would be in some ways even harder than the fight in Al Anbar; at least out there I’d had some idea who my enemies were.

  4.

  The First Washington Fight

  Iraq

  After reuniting at the Fort Riley airfield and hurriedly packing our things, Jack, Susi, and I set off for Washington. We stopped by my mom’s house in Kansas City to celebrate Jack’s third birthday and drove on to crash at my friend Chris Traugott’s house in Arlington, Virginia, just a few miles from the Pentagon. Chris, who had been the head delegate of Wellesley College’s Model United Nations team some fifteen years earlier, had obviously been fated to meet the guy running West Point’s Model UN Team at the Georgetown conference during our respective senior years in college. We had remained close ever since that meeting in the Key Bridge Marriott not far from Georgetown, close enough that Chris was willing to have Jack, Susi, and me stay with her for a few weeks as we looked for a place to live in the environs of D.C. My orders to lieutenant colonel had come through in the interim, and in an impromptu ceremony in Chris’s living room, Susi and Chris placed new silver epaulets on my uniform shirt the morning before I headed in to work at the Pentagon.

  I had been hoping, after my return from Iraq, to use a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship (IAF) in Washington to think and write about the counterinsurgency campaign I had just conducted, hopefully with an eye toward capturing some lessons learned that would be useful for the broader war effort. The Army supported the idea; I’d been selected as an IAF several years earlier but had postponed taking the fellowship in order to accomplish the tasks the Army expects of armor majors—typically, a year as an XO and a year as the S3 of a tank battalion or brigade. That had all been on track until Peter Maass’s New York Times Magazine article attracted the attention of General Richard Cody, vice chief of staff of the Army, who decided that I would make a great speechwriter. I’d dodged this gig before—Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera had made a serious bid for my speechwriting services while I was teaching in the Sosh department, and I was able to evade that assignment only with great difficulty. Unlike Caldera, Dick Cody was unlikely to take no for an answer from a brand-new lieutenant colonel, and I resigned myself to my fate.

  Rescue of the “from the frying pan into the fire” kind came from an unexpected direction. Brigadier General Frank Helmick, who had been the assistant division commander at Fort Riley while I was rebuilding tank nuclear, biological, chemical (NBC) protective systems, was now serving as the military assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Dr. Wolfowitz was the man who had thought General Shinseki’s estimate of “several hundred thousand” troops to maintain stability in Iraq after an invasion “wildly off the mark.” Helmick wanted an Army lieutenant colonel to serve in the deputy secretary’s office and remembered me kindly from the tank NBC imbroglio. Petraeus also weighed in on my behalf from Iraq, although I didn’t know it at the time. Helmick placed a call to Task Force 1-34 in Al Anbar, told me that I was coming to work for Secretary Wolfowitz, and seemed completely unconcerned about the fact that the vice chief of staff of the Army, a four-star general, already had his eyes on me. Helmick promised to take care of that little issue, and so it was not to the Council on Foreign Relations or to the office of the vice chief of staff of the Army that I reported on November 1, 2004, but to the belly of the beast, the office of the deputy secretary of defense.

  I was replacing a Navy commander, as Helmick wanted more of an Army presence in the office given the weight the Army was carrying in Iraq. There was another Navy officer in the shop, a newly promoted surface warfare officer named Captain Sean O’Connor, who ran triathalons as well as a famously tight ship, both literally and figuratively. Sean, a member of the Naval Academy’s Athletic Hall of Fame for his exploits on the lightweight football team as a midshipman, had as his top priority every day getting in a workout at the Pentagon Athletic Club. Given that every day was a twelve-hour workday, with first call at 0600, this was not only reasonable but necessary to stay sane, and I soon began jockeying for my gym time as well.

  A one-star Army general, a Navy captain, and an Army lieutenant colonel would seem to be enough people to staff any one human being, but Paul Wolfowitz was not just anyone. I soon found him to be analytically ruthless, dedicated to finding answers, and completely and totally disorganized. Wolfowitz was a brilliant academic, a respected policy wonk, and an accomplished diplomat, but he may not have been the optimum choice for chief operating officer of the world’s largest and most complicated organization.

  In fact, Paul had originally been slated to be deputy secretary of state, a role for which he would have been much better suited. He had become close to George W. Bush as one of the original “Vulcans” who advised the candidate on foreign and national security policy, of whom the most important was Condoleezza Rice. Donald Rumsfeld, who had served as secretary of defense many years before, was not close to the new president but, like Colin Powell as secretary of state, was intended to provide foreign policy gravitas for a young president who was inexperienced abroad. The idea was that Wolfowitz would be Powell’s deputy and Rich Armitage, another Naval Academy graduate and a man with a reputation for getting things done, would serve as Rumsfeld’s deputy in the Pentagon. However, when Armitage reported to Rumsfeld for a discussion about the job, the new secretary of defense opened the conversation with the words “You know, Rich, there’s about a ten percent chance I�
��m going to accept you as my deputy.” Armitage, not easily bullied, replied, “That’s okay, Don, there’s about a zero percent chance I’m going to accept.” And thus Armitage and Powell, who were great friends, served together at State, and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were to run the Department of Defense.

  It was not a happy pairing. Rumsfeld had been selected in order to get control of Pentagon spending by applying business practices to the Defense Department; in between his tours in the Pentagon, he had run two Fortune 500 companies, G.D. Searle and General Instruments. He had succeeded in part by applying ruthless efficiencies to the companies, a practice he promised to repeat in what Rumsfeld saw as a bloated Pentagon. In fact, on September 10, 2001, Secretary Rumsfeld famously gave a speech in the Pentagon auditorium stating that the most serious threat to American national security was the Pentagon bureaucracy. Less than twenty-four hours later, with the Pentagon in flames, he was revealed to have been somewhat mistaken, if personally courageous, as he helped rescue the wounded, even as others made the critical decisions about whether to shoot down airliners that were potential threats on that dark day.

  Rumsfeld might have been a good secretary of defense if, as almost everyone expected, the decade of relative peace after the end of the Cold War had continued and the biggest problem the Pentagon faced was downsizing while retaining the capabilities needed to hedge against a rising China. But he was the wrong man to serve as secretary of war in an irregular conflict against a very different enemy than the one his department had been prepared to fight. Defeating this opponent would require huge changes in the mental construct the department used to think about the world and its role in that world, and Rumsfeld was never able to make those adjustments.

  Paul Wolfowitz (right) in 2009 at our home in Alexandria with Colonel (retired) John Collins, neighbor and mentor.

  Wolfowitz, a more agile thinker, was able to make them but was not particularly willing to do so. He had been a major—perhaps the major—voice urging the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, arguing to President Bush on the day after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks that Iraq must have been involved. After the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, when Saddam’s regime crumpled even more quickly than he had dared hope, Wolfowitz rejoiced—but he, and the department he oversaw, were completely unprepared for what came next.

  Rumsfeld had argued stridently before the invasion that it was the Department of Defense, rather than Powell’s Department of State, that should be responsible for the postwar occupation of Iraq. But having won the right to take charge, he failed to follow through, appointing retired General Jay Garner as director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance far too late in the day and without adequate resources to accomplish his huge mission in a postwar Iraq. When Garner failed miserably, through little fault of his own, former ambassador Paul Bremer was given the job and a new acronym: the CPA, or Coalition Provisional Authority. The CPA exerted varying influence in Baghdad and essentially none outside it and had little direction from the Pentagon after the disastrous mandates Bremer issued almost immediately upon his arrival in Baghdad: disbanding the Iraqi Army, firing tens of thousands of Ba’ath Party members from Iraqi government employment (and most employment in Iraq was with government-owned industries or entities), and slow-rolling democracy.

  Rumsfeld paid insufficient attention not only to the semicivilian responsibilities he had fought to gain control over but also to the military ones that were clearly in his domain. Army General Tommy Franks, the commander who had overseen both the initial fight in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, retired from the Army while Baghdad was still burning. Command of an Iraq that was visibly in ruins was given to the most junior three-star general in the Army, the recently promoted Ricardo Sanchez. Sanchez’s V Corps headquarters was neither prepared nor sufficiently manned to handle the political-military tasks required to rebuild a broken country and to get it up and running again, and he and his team had been given no warning that they would be taking on such a responsibility. Clearly out of his depth, Sanchez struggled to coordinate the actions of the Army divisions that were reporting to him, failing to create a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy across the country.

  Sanchez would be replaced, after a very difficult first year as the overall commander of the effort to pacify Iraq, by Vice Chief of Staff of the Army George Casey, who had preceded General Cody in that job. Casey was the son of the most senior Army officer killed in Vietnam. His father had been commanding the First Cavalry Division when his helicopter crashed into the side of a Vietnamese mountain in heavy fog, killing all aboard. Casey received notification that he would be assuming command in Iraq from President Bush while in Chief of Staff of the Army Peter Schoomaker’s office. After Casey accepted the assignment and thanked the president, Schoomaker pulled a copy of Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, which Newt Gingrich had encouraged the chief to read, from a shelf and told him that it was time to start studying. Casey read the book that weekend and would later admit that he had not previously done any reading on insurgency. Iraq was also his first combat experience. He, like Sanchez before him, was not set up for success by his institution and those above him in the chain of command, although just how grievously Rumsfeld and General Casey were out of step with the president himself would not become clear for some years to come.

  General Casey’s immediate problem was one left behind by his predecessor, but it was really the fault of the National Command Authority. By the time Casey took over from General Sanchez, Fallujah had become a bleeding ulcer in western Al Anbar, an internal sanctuary from which insurgents, including Al Qaeda in Iraq, staged attacks in Baghdad and out west. Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman had been beaten to death there precisely because his battalion had stood in the way of attacks on the rest of Al Anbar coming out of Fallujah. The Fallujah problem would have to be dealt with eventually, and eventually turned out to be immediately after the 2004 presidential election in the United States.

  The fight was savage, not a twilight struggle against hit-and-run insurgents but a set-piece urban battle against enemy fighters who had no place to run. It was the toughest fighting American forces had done since Hue in Vietnam, the battle I later chose for the cover photo of the paperback edition of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, which would come out the following year. Second Fallujah was the bloodiest battle of the war in Iraq for Americans, with 95 killed and 560 wounded. As many as 2,000 enemies were killed in the fighting, which was complete by the end of December. But the second battle of Fallujah, while important in removing an insurgent sanctuary, was far from decisive in the Iraq campaign, and in fact the broader Iraq insurgencies continued to gain strength after the battle was over.

  From my perch in the deputy secretary’s office, I was making friends and building alliances in a quest to think differently about the situation we faced in Iraq and what we needed to do differently there. Jim Thomas had been Dr. Wolfowitz’s student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and had come to work for Wolfowitz as a special assistant. By the time I arrived in the Pentagon, Jim had been promoted to deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, a job for which he was well suited. Thin and intense, with bright eyes behind his glasses, Jim was a man who recognized and collected talent. He had heard an impressive presentation by an Australian Army lieutenant colonel some months previously and decided to bring the Aussie on his staff to work on the Quadrennial Defense Review, a comprehensive evaluation of U.S. strategy and force structure required by the Congress every four years—for which Jim was in charge of the evaluation team. He insisted that I meet Dave Kilcullen, certain that we would get along.

  Jim was right. Kilcullen had also earned a Ph.D. in counterinsurgency studies, his at the University of New South Wales and focused on Indonesia. He was, as Jim Thomas had noted, hugely impressive, with a quick mind and a very persuasive manner about his speech; everything sounds smarter when
a Brit or an Australian says it. After our first meeting, I immediately called Steve Metz, who had invited me to speak at the annual U.S. Army War College Strategy Conference at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, in April 2005, and volunteered to give up some of my time to Kilcullen if Steve would add him to the program.

  COINdinistas: David Kilcullen, Erin Simpson, Janine Davidson, and me, July 2007.

  We ended up driving to Carlisle in the same car. Kilcullen had a son, Harry, who was almost exactly the same age as Jack. They would become good friends over the next year, as would Dave and I. His performance at the Army War College was as impressive as I had expected it to be, and Dave became a coconspirator in the emerging effort to change the way the United States was thinking about the war in Iraq.

  For my own talk, I pulled out the slides I’d used when working on my thesis at Oxford, adapting them to the specifics of the current war in Iraq. The title of the presentation was “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam for the War in Iraq.” I gave some version of this talk dozens and dozens of times over the next five years, to audiences ranging from the office of the deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and stability operations to the Defense Policy Board. In every talk, I emphasized the fact that conventional military forces had historically struggled with the need to adapt to defeat insurgencies, and those that succeeded in learning to protect the population did so because they were adaptive learning organizations. I made it clear that there was a lot of work to be done for the American military establishment to reach that category in Iraq. An e-mail summarizing my presentation and Kilcullen’s similar one began to circulate after the Army War College conference, reinforcing points that I’d made in my book and that Peter Maass had suggested in his New York Times Magazine article: that counterinsurgency was hard, that conventional military forces were poorly trained and equipped to succeed in the tasks, but that they could learn and adapt to be more effective in this kind of fight if properly led and instructed. It was nice that someone had taken notes, but it often didn’t feel like anyone was listening.