by John A. Nagl
With Paul Yingling at the Council on Foreign Relations, February 13, 2008.
Paul has now retired as a lieutenant colonel, not having served long enough as a full colonel to keep that rank in retirement, and is pugnaciously teaching social studies at an international baccalaureate high school in Colorado Springs. In yet another mark of his strong character and general poor judgment, Paul does not resent me for throwing him under the bus, believing that had I kept my name on the piece, I would not have been able to continue advocating change in the Army. He received the Public Service Award from the University of Chicago in 2013 in recognition of his intellectual and moral courage.
Secretary Rumsfeld’s continued refusal to acknowledge that there was an insurgency in Iraq—extending even to forbidding the use of the word insurgency to describe what was happening there—and his continued emphasis on withdrawing U.S. troops as rapidly as possible even in the face of the escalating civil war through the course of 2006, eventually became too much for President Bush to ignore. Secretary Rumsfeld was very close to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was determined to protect his old friend; Bush’s decision to overrule Cheney and fire Rumsfeld in many ways marked the end of the six-year foreign policy string of errors that Tom Ricks correctly described as a Fiasco. It would remain for Rumsfeld’s replacement, Bob Gates, to pick up the pieces and develop policies that would allow the United States to accomplish some of its core national security objectives and depart Iraq with a degree of honor and without leaving behind a Sunni–Shia civil war that might have consumed the entire Middle East.
6.
Proof of Concept
Iraq 2007–2008
With final revisions of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual under way at Fort Leavenworth, I departed the Pentagon in October 2006 to take command of the First Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kansas. 1-34 was the same unit with which I had fought in Iraq as operations officer. Giving lieutenant colonels command of units they had served in as majors had been anathema to the Army before the war, but given the constant churn of units deploying to and from Iraq, any stability or familiarity was a good thing. Returning lieutenant colonels to command their former units had now become official policy, and near the end of my first year in the Pentagon, I was delighted to get the news that I was returning to command of the Centurions from General Dick Cody, the vice chief of staff of the Army from whose speechwriting office Frank Helmick had delivered me.
I was not prepared for the next piece of information I received. The battalion had been slated to deploy to Iraq in 2005 but had been “off-ramped” as part of the Pentagon’s continuing effort to minimize deployed troop numbers. Instead, a number of subordinate companies had deployed as Security Forces (SECFOR), escorting logistics convoys all over Iraq in up-armored Humvees. The work was important, but it wasn’t tanking—and the deployment of the two SECFOR companies meant that the unit I was about to assume command of wasn’t a complete, deployable tank battalion. Given that fact, the Army’s decision to turn the First Battalion, 34th Armor into a training organization designed to build, train, and deploy military transition teams that would then embed with Iraqi or Afghan security forces almost made sense.
Everyone’s favorite farewell gift from the Pentagon—a visitor’s badge! The photo is of me eating soup with a knife in the Pentagon dining room, a joke that apparently never grows old, 2006.
But the move was likely the kiss of death for my Army career, such as it was. My buddies would spend their battalion command tours preparing for and then deploying to combat, while I would never leave Kansas in an operational role. And as hard as I tried to convince myself that what we were doing to prepare the advisory teams that would train and fight with Afghan and Iraqi security forces was far more important for the overall course of both wars than was any possible contribution a deployed tank battalion could make, I was still very disappointed that I wouldn’t get to lead troops in combat as a battalion commander.
Missing the chance to command in a war that had been the sole focus of the past three years of my life was a blow from which my love of the Army never really recovered; I had called the ball on counterinsurgency and received command of a tank battalion without tanks as thanks. Adding insult to injury, the Army not only took all our tanks away; it took all our weapons as well, underlining the truth that we were a training organization rather than a deployable combat formation. Some of our troopers joked that there were Girl Scout troops that were better armed than was our tank battalion.
I probably could have wiggled out of the assignment and gotten command of a real tank battalion, one with enough weapons to overthrow a small country rather than one that posed no threat to the average Girl Scout troop. I was in a powerful office, working for the deputy secretary of the entire Department of Defense; it wouldn’t have taken much complaining to have my orders changed, sending another lieutenant colonel to the training mission. But the only time I had ever pulled strings to get an assignment was after my dad died, when I had asked for Fort Riley, two hours away from my mom. I’d said counterinsurgency was important, and now I was going to get the chance to demonstrate that I meant what I’d said.
Amid the disappointment, there was some good news. Although literally in the middle of nowhere, Fort Riley is a wonderful old frontier Army post, with big stone houses for command sergeants major and battalion commanders, and our house was one of the lovely, historic limestone dwellings built in a bygone era. More important, the fact that I wasn’t deploying to the fight in Iraq gave me more time to fight to persuade the Army that it needed to take counterinsurgency seriously.
The deployable units at Fort Riley are all headquartered on the ironically named Custer Hill, at which the Seventh Cavalry had been stationed for several years before its fateful rendezvous with Sitting Bull. When I arrived, the First of the 34th Armor was moving off the hill down to Camp Funston, the point of origin of the global influenza epidemic of 1919 that killed more people than had died in the First World War. Funston had been used again as a deployment site during the Second World War, and a number of wood-frame barracks from that period remained, but my battalion would be housed not in those drafty if historic buildings but in trailers. Battalion command posts were double-wides. Sergeant Shoe, my Desert Storm gunner from West Virginia, would have been right at home.
Double-wide sweet double-wide, 2006.
The Army had built two actual nontrailer steel-frame buildings to serve as barracks for the military transition team members. They deployed to Fort Riley for an eight-week training cycle. It was our job, during that time, to qualify them on their individual weapons, form them into vehicle crews, and train them to fire heavy weapons, including the M2 .50-caliber machine gun, the 7.62mm M249 machine gun, and the automatic grenade launcher. We also provided rudimentary Dari or Arabic training, some advice on how to advise Afghans or Iraqis, and the basics of counterinsurgency, a task I took on myself not just for the MTT teams assigned to my battalion but to all MTT teams trained by the other three battalions in the brigade as well. I relied, yet again, on the slides I’d made to defend my doctoral dissertation, although they were heavily modified by now with additions from David Galula and the writing of the counterinsurgency manual and featured the Chiarelli/Michaelis “lines of operation” slide.
Teaching COIN in a double-wide, 2007.
One of the few benefits of commanding an MTT training battalion rather than a tank battalion deployed in Iraq was that I was in the United States when the Counterinsurgency Field Manual saw the light of day after what had to be the fastest drafting-to-publication schedule in Army history. When it was published on December 15, 2006, the international media outcry was astounding. In November Secretary Gates, when asked whether the United States was winning the war in Iraq, at his confirmation hearing to replace Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, had correctly answered “No, sir,” and the world was watching to see whether Gates, quickly confirmed as secretary, could turn the war around. New personnel are th
e punctuation point on new policy, and the commander in Iraq would also soon change. General Petraeus was widely viewed as the likely candidate to replace George Casey in command, and the Counterinsurgency Field Manual was the way he would go about doing it if given the chance. There is no comparable moment in history when a general has taken the time to plan out how he intends to fight a war that is currently being lost, publishes the plan publicly, and then goes to war to execute the playbook he has written.
With Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Art DeGroat and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (center), after his lecture at Kansas State University, November 26, 2007.
The manual was downloaded more than a million times in the first month after it had been published. Ultimately, copies were even found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan, and it was translated and critiqued on jihadi Web sites. Our enemies were reading it; we had to get our guys to read it. In support of that effort, General Petraeus asked me to do some of the publicity associated with the launch, and I participated in a number of interviews, including one on National Public Radio. It had far-reaching consequences.
A week or so after the interview aired, I received a phone call from a man I didn’t know who told me that I had been a “driveway moment” for him: although he’d arrived where he was heading, he didn’t turn his car off in order to hear the end of my discussion of the counterinsurgency manual on his car radio. He had me at “driveway moment.”
He told me that he worked for the U.S. Naval Institute, which was putting together a national security conference at the end of January in San Diego and had scheduled Admiral William “Fox” Fallon to speak. Fallon had just been nominated to replace General Abizaid as the commander of Central Command and had dropped the speaking engagement to prepare for his confirmation hearings. Would I fill in for the admiral and talk about the new counterinsurgency doctrine? I pointed out that he was replacing a full admiral, an officer with the pay grade of ten, with literally half the man, an Army O-5 whom he’d never met. He told me that I’d be fine, based on what he’d heard on the radio. I agreed to give the talk and decided to take Susi along on my dime as she’d never been to San Diego. We left Jack with my mom in Kansas City.
San Diego in January is a nice place, and there was a good-size crowd for my breakfast talk, including a retired Marine three-star general I knew. I introduced him to Susi before I gave my talk, and afterward he called me over for a chat. Cutting straight to the point, the general said, “Son, you need to get out of the Army.”
I was surprised. Was the talk that bad?
No, he said, it was fine—in fact, he offered, I could probably do more for the Army out of uniform than in it at my current pay grade. Moreover, he sensed that my wife was ready for me to get out of the army, and he’d seen too many officers lose their families and their careers. Save yours, he advised, making it clear that my family was the one he meant.
Thus began a yearlong discussion with my wife and the hardest decision of my career. Susi had never been a good fit in the Army. While personable and fun-loving, she didn’t truly warm to the women for whom being married to the Army was a career in itself, and in all honesty, they didn’t warm to her. Still, she’d been a good sport, as Paul Yingling said when I told him that I was thinking of getting out. Beyond that, I sensed I’d have little trouble finding another way to contribute. Then–Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli weighed in hard from his perch as senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense Gates to get me to stay in the Army and almost succeeded with a five-page handwritten letter. He was a good man facing hard challenges, including retaining the Army’s talent after a decade of grinding war. As I told General Chiarelli later, if I’d been sleeping with him instead of Susi, he would have won the fight.
In addition to the visit to San Diego, I also answered an invitation to speak on the manual at the Center for Naval Analysis in Washington at the request of my Al Anbar Province friend Carter Malkasian, like me a product of Bob O’Neill’s supervision at Oxford. After that talk, the director of program analysis and evaluation at the Pentagon asked a hard question about my day job, training military transition team members. I was fairly critical in my response, and he asked whether I had a better answer to the problem of providing advisers to the Iraqi and Afghan Armies that I could put in writing. I wrote it that weekend, sent him a draft copy, and then submitted “Institutionalizing Adaptation: It’s Time for a Permanent Army Advisor Corps” to Military Review, which had published so many articles to such good effect over the preceding five years. Military Review said that they’d be happy to publish it but were backlogged; would publication in a year be acceptable?
It would not. The article I’d written was based on my experience commanding one of the battalions preparing advisers for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was furious at the ad-hocracy that underlay everything the Army was doing in adviser selection and training; our consensus at Fort Riley was that they were picking the wrong people (those who had not yet deployed to combat, rather than the most talented who had), sending them to the wrong place (a Kansas prairie to prepare them to operate in deserts and mountains, when we had a superb training area with mountains and deserts at the National Training Center in California), training them with the wrong people (tank drivers rather than the Special Forces Green Berets who actually knew how to execute a train and advise mission), and then disbanding trained, battle-tested adviser teams a year later, only to create new ones from scratch to replace them.
It was no way to run a railroad. When asked about the Army’s performance of this critical mission by Lieutenant General Doug Lute, then serving at the White House as the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, I told him, “We only need to do better if we want to win.”
I mentioned Military Review’s reluctance to rapidly publish the piece on standing up permanent adviser forces to Jim Miller during one of our periodic talks. Jim had just taken on the arduous job of director of studies at a new defense policy think tank in Washington, the Center for a New American Security (or CNAS, so named because the Old American Security wasn’t working out so well in the post–September 11 world). CNAS had been spun out of another Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, by two former deputy assistant secretaries of defense, Kurt Campbell and Michèle Flournoy. They were convinced that what Washington needed was yet another think tank, and they courageously decided to stand up an organization that they dedicated to the promotion of strong, principled, pragmatic defense and security policies. While CNAS was officially nonpartisan and included scholars from both political parties, both Kurt and Michèle had served in the Pentagon for President Clinton. Furious about the shortcomings of defense policy under George W. Bush, particularly the Iraq debacle, they believed that they could take national security policy away from the Republicans as a campaign issue in the forthcoming presidential election season.
I had met Kurt and Michèle before and was impressed by both, but it was Jim Miller who pulled me into the CNAS orbit through the mechanism of my article on improving the foreign military advisory effort. Under the title “Institutionalizing Adaptation: It’s Time for a Permanent Army Advisor Corps,” it became the first piece CNAS published in June 2007, released at a conference attended by many Washington policy wonks. The idea of a standing Army adviser corps would gain appreciable attention, including endorsements by both Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, but it has still not been fully implemented—a grievous failure to understand the strategic environment and build the forces necessary to succeed in it that now puts at risk everything the nation and international community have invested in Afghanistan.
However, Afghanistan was not perceived to be the risk of the moment in 2007. There was room in the national conversation for only one war at a time, and that war was Iraq. The American effort there was clearly in trouble. Stung by the loss of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2006 midter
m elections, President George W. Bush had replaced Secretary Rumsfeld with former director of central intelligence Bob Gates, a low-key Kansan who described his priorities as “Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq” at his confirmation hearing. He headed to Iraq on December 18, the day after he was sworn in as secretary of defense and just three days after the publication of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The president had decided to double down on Iraq, against the advice of almost everyone concerned, and needed new people to implement the new policy: Gates and David Petraeus, whom he subsequently nominated for a fourth star, would implement the new counterinsurgency strategy that Petraeus had been thinking about continually for the past year. When Petraeus met with the president, he corrected his boss’s statement that he was “doubling down” in Iraq; no, Mr. President, he said, you’re going all in. And, he added, we need the rest of the U.S. government to go all in with the military.
The metaphor was apt, even if it did become an unfortunate title for the biography of Petraeus written by Paula Broadwell in 2012. The president committed additional troops to implement the new strategy—literally all the ground troops the nation had available to deploy to Iraq: five Army brigades, with deployments stretched from the usual twelve to fifteen full months, two Marine battalions, a Marine expeditionary unit, and a variety of other elements, including an aviation brigade, a division headquarters, and other combat support and logistical elements. The Army units would be used to clear and hold in Baghdad and the “Baghdad Belts” around the city that the insurgents were using as staging grounds, while the Marines would be sent to Al Anbar, then apparently in danger of slipping completely into the hands of insurgents.