by John A. Nagl
The story of the origins of the surge, as this additional deployment of more than 25,000 troops was called, is an extremely unusual one. General Casey had taken aboard his boss General John Abizaid’s belief that American troops deployed to the Middle East inspired such significant antibodies that fewer American boots on the ground was almost always the right answer, even as violence spiraled over the course of 2006. This was music to the ears of Secretary Rumsfeld, who had fought to prevent the deployment of a large number of American troops to Iraq in the first place and had not changed his mind simply because things hadn’t worked out as planned. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were concerned about doing fatal damage to the all-volunteer force, which was clearly creaking under the strain of repeated deployments; the default answer thus was to draw down American troops as soon as possible, an answer perhaps prompted by the fact that they knew it was the one the secretary of defense wanted to hear.
In this context, the most critical voice arguing for the deployment of more troops to Iraq was someone with no official standing whatsoever. General Jack Keane had recently retired as vice chief of staff of the Army, turning down a promotion to chief of staff officially because of his wife’s health problems, although many speculated that he did not want to work for Secretary Rumsfeld. Himself a Vietnam veteran, Keane fumed at the prospect of America losing another counterinsurgency campaign. He was extremely close to Petraeus, at whose side he had been standing when a trooper from the 101st Airborne tripped and accidentally shot then–Lieutenant Colonel Petraeus in the chest during a training exercise. Major General Keane had flown with Petraeus in the medical evacuation helicopter and ensured that the best surgeon in the region—a certain Dr. Bill Frist, who later became Senate majority leader but on this day came straight to the operating room from the golf course—was the person who sewed his subordinate back together again. Keane now became the de facto senior military adviser to President Bush, advocating powerfully for more troops, a new commander, and a new strategy for Iraq, all against the express wishes of the serving chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine General Peter Pace, and theater commander General George Casey.
Bush’s decision to deploy an additional 20,000 “surge” troops (which grew to well over 25,000) to Iraq in an attempt to end the escalating Sunni–Shia civil war was the bravest of his presidency. He made the decision against the advice of almost all his advisers as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who eventually bought in only in return for a long-overdue presidential decision to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps to begin to relieve the increasing strain on the force. It is hard to remember now how bad the situation looked in Iraq at the time. At his confirmation hearing for the position of overall commander in Iraq, General Petraeus had to remind the Senate Armed Services Committee that “hard is not hopeless.” The president has enormous freedom of action in foreign policy decisions. Against their better judgment, the Senators gave Bush one last chance in Iraq and confirmed Petraeus for his fourth star.
Although many of the COINdinistas went to Baghdad to work with General Petraeus, including Dave Kilcullen and H. R. McMaster, I was not called. Petraeus thought my battalion command too important to my career, and my role helping train, educate, and inspire future advisers to the Iraqi and Afghan security forces too critical, to pull me out of that role. Instead he asked me to serve as his surrogate explaining and defending the Counterinsurgency Field Manual to the American people.
That role had started when the field manual was released with the NPR appearance that ultimately resulted in the conversation in San Diego and led to my retirement from the Army. It went in directions that no one expected, however, on a January 2007 visit to the University of Chicago to give a talk on the principles of counterinsurgency and their application in Iraq. I dropped by the University of Chicago Press to meet the editors I’d worked with on the paperback edition of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. When asked what I’d been doing for America lately, I proudly noted that the Counterinsurgency Field Manual had been downloaded more than a million times in the month since we had posted it online. Editor John Tryneski, sensing a bestseller, asked who held the copyright. When I couldn’t answer, he inquired whether I’d be willing to write a foreword to a paperback edition if Chicago could garner the publication rights. I readily agreed, and when John discovered that the government allows open publication of all field manuals, Chicago jumped on the opportunity.
It became only the second field manual to be published by a university press, the first being the Marine Corps’ Small Wars Manual of 1940, published by the Sunflower Press of Kansas State University, not far from Fort Riley. The finished University of Chicago version, published in a World War II style cover complete with rounded corners to fit into fatigue pockets and simulated “dirt” ground into the creases, featured an introduction by Sarah Sewall that began, “This counterinsurgency manual challenges much of what is holy about the American way of war. . . . Those who fail to see the manual as radical probably don’t understand it, or at least understand what it’s up against.” Con Crane later said that Sarah’s introduction was as good as the whole rest of the book put together. She decried the lack of a broader U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, describing the field manual as a “moon without a planet to orbit” in the absence of national-level counterinsurgency guidance, and also presciently expressed concern about the staying power of the American public, which she thought unlikely to “supply greater concentrations of forces, accept higher casualties, fund serious nation- building and stay many long years to conduct counterinsurgency by the book.”
I wrote a foreword that explained both the evolution and the importance of the manual, beginning by noting that when an insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the Army was unprepared to fight it. The foreword concluded with praise of David Galula’s thinking:
Of the many books that were influential in the writing of Field Manual 3-24, perhaps none was as important as David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. Galula, a French Army officer who drew many valuable lessons from his service in France’s unsuccessful campaign against Algerian insurgents, was a strong advocate of counterinsurgency doctrine. He wrote, “If the individual members of the organizations were of the same mind, if every organization worked according to a standard pattern, the problem would be solved. Is this not precisely what a coherent, well-understood, and accepted doctrine would tend to achieve?”
The University of Chicago Press released its edition of the manual on July 4, 2007, just as the surge forces were beginning to make progress in breaking down the wall of resistance from Iraqi insurgents and militia members. The press did a great job of getting it out to media outlets for reviews to expand its reach. The field manual was reviewed favorably by Sarah Sewall’s colleague at Harvard, Samantha Power, on the front page of The New York Times Sunday Book Review—the first time a military doctrinal manual had risen to the attention of the Times, which called it a “landmark.”
Chicago also sent a copy of the field manual to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as I discovered while running Machine Gun Range 8 at Fort Riley one sunny Monday in August. As military transition teams were qualifying on the range, my cell phone rang with a New York number, and a young woman invited me to appear on The Daily Show that Thursday night to discuss the field manual with Jon Stewart. The Daily Show had never even appeared on my radar screen as a lifetime stretch goal. I agreed immediately, then had to convince the Army that letting me fulfill that promise was a good idea.
Fortunately, I knew the Army’s chief of public affairs, Brigadier General Tony Cucolo, from giving a talk about counterinsurgency to his team at Joint Force Headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, the previous year. He knew something was up when I called (I think his exact words were “This can’t be good”), and I got to the point quickly: I was going to appear on The Daily Show to talk about the Counterinsurgency Field Manual on Thursday night, either in uniform with the Army’s permission or in a sui
t and tie without it. I mentioned The Daily Show’s status as the number-one news source among under-thirties in the United States in case General Cucolo had any interest in getting the Army in front of that demographic.
He asked for twenty-four hours to work the problem and called back the next day with official permission and an admonition: “Nagl, don’t [mess] this up.” Interestingly, that was the exact same advice that First Infantry Division Commander Carter Ham had given me when I assumed command of the Centurions; apparently, I had that effect on Army generals.
Almost anything goes in Manhattan, but not many people walk around in Army greens in August. I received a few stares in the hotel lobby, took a ride over to the taping in a Daily Show limo, and then cooled my heels in the green room. Jon Stewart came by a few minutes before taping began, carrying his young son. He apologized for getting only about halfway through the manual, and I told him that that was all I’d read of it, too, but that I thought we’d still have plenty to talk about.
We did. The audience was friendly at the start but cooled off quickly when I described the manual in a phrase attributed to General Jim Mattis: “Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill.” I pointed out that this was a good rule to follow in New York as well, and Jon agreed.
The experience was surprisingly enjoyable and helped buy General Petraeus some support at a rough time in the fight for Baghdad. He’d taken command of the American effort in Iraq from General Casey in Baghdad on February 10, 2007. The security situation he faced was dire, but he had additional resources with which to attack it: five Army brigades plus the two Marine battalions and the Marine expeditionary unit for Al Anbar.
Far more important than the number of additional troops deployed was the mission change they were given by Petraeus and the operational-level commander, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno. As Petraeus would often note later, “the most important surge was the surge of ideas, not the surge of forces,” and the biggest of the big ideas was captured in the new mission, which, in accordance with the dictates of the new field manual, emphasized the imperative of securing the population first. A big step in this direction was the creation, during 2007, of seventy-seven new joint security stations and combat outposts throughout Baghdad, manned by American troops and their Iraqi Army and Police counterparts. American casualties rose as the Army cleared neighborhoods controlled by insurgents or militia fighters, but the locals benefited from a higher level of security. As the field manual suggested, when security improved, economic and political progress soon followed.
Napoleon famously said, “All my generals are good. Give me ones who are lucky.” Petraeus was both good enough and lucky enough to take advantage of the Sunni Awakening, the decision of several Sunni tribes to switch sides and fight against the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda after being assured the support of American forces. This development, which was similar to those earlier in the war that literally died due to lack of support in Baghdad, was years in the making. It marked a dramatic change in American policy, which had until then stubbornly ignored tribal power structures in favor of democratic processes for which Iraq was simply not ready.
Petraeus had, himself, overseen reconciliation with Sunnis in the summer of 2003, only to see the hope of a broader negotiated settlement evaporate due to nonsupport in Baghdad. Now he had the wisdom to recognize this opportunity and the courage to seize it—interestingly, without asking for permission from his superiors in Washington. He felt the conduct of the war and negotiations with America’s enemies in it were all within his span of authority. And stating often that it was not possible to kill or capture your way to success against an industrial-strength insurgency, he returned to Iraq knowing that he would need to foster reconciliation with those insurgents and their supporters willing to reject Al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgent leaders.
With Petraeus directing a new strategy to nurture the “shoots” of the nascent awakening, it quickly grew from its origins outside Ramadi, throughout Al Anbar province, and in subsequent months, into Baghdad’s Ameriyah neighborhood, itself no rose garden. My West Point classmate and senior-year roommate Lieutenant Colonel Dale Kuehl, who was commanding 1-5 Cavalry in the area, was able to back Sunni leader Abu Abid with support directly from Petraeus (who happened to go for a run with Kuehl’s executive officer at a key moment) when that brave Sunni leader chose to turn against AQI in late May 2007.
In the months that followed, this process was repeated throughout the Sunni areas and then commenced in Shia areas, where U.S. forces supported tribal leaders who wanted to oppose the militia elements that had made life difficult in their neighborhoods. Adversaries became allies in a vivid illustration of the classic principle “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” A platoon leader in Kuehl’s battalion described the overnight transformation in Ameriyah with dramatic understatement: “It was weird.” Petraeus, briefed on the possibility of a switch in the Sunnis’ allegiance by Kuehl’s number two, had two instructions: “Do not let our Army stop you” and “Do not let the Iraqi government stop you.” It was that kind of war.
Neither the U.S. Army (in which some commanders did not initially like the idea of reconciling with those who had our troopers’ blood on their hands) nor the Shia-led Iraqi government (leery of accommodating the Sunnis who had once dominated Iraq) was able to stop what eventually became the “Sons of Iraq” concept, which spread like wildfire across the Sunni west and center of the country.
Getting Dale Kuehl ready for a parade at West Point.
The effective end of the Sunni insurgency and the implementation of Petraeus’s joint security stations also eliminated the need for the Shi’ite militias that had sprung up to defend their sect against their old enemies—and that then carried out many of the sectarian attacks on Sunni areas in Baghdad and much of the crime in southern Iraq. And in March 2008, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki deployed the Iraqi Army to clear the militias from Basra and Sadr City, tasks in which it succeeded thanks to considerable support by U.S. forces. By the time Petraeus left Iraq in September of that year, the net result of the surge was a decrease in violence by nearly 80 percent and the lowest American casualty rates of the war.
There is now a significant debate over the extent to which Petraeus’s leadership, and the doctrine he authored and then implemented, was in fact responsible for the incontrovertible change on the ground. Doctoral dissertations will be written on the subject for decades to come, but the best work so far was an article written by my friend Steve Biddle and two accomplices for the respected journal International Security in 2012. In it, Steve, Jeffrey Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro conduct exhaustive quantitative analysis to determine whether more troops or the new employment of the troops mattered more. They find it hard to isolate the independent variable that caused the change:
It is difficult, however, to distinguish which surge component—reinforcement or doctrinal change—was most important in Iraq, primarily because there was little variation in force employment during this period. After February 2007, General Petraeus strove to enforce consistent methods across the theater, and none of our interviewees reported tactical choices at odds with prevailing doctrine. The modest scale of reinforcements in 2007 suggests that doctrine may have been the decisive factor.1
The debate over what caused the dramatic reduction in violence in Iraq is of more than academic interest. If counterinsurgency strategies that focus on protecting the local population are in fact effective, as Steve Biddle and his friends say the data suggest, then people who know how to conduct it should be protected and promoted in the armed services, particularly the Army.
One of the most important innovators in counterinsurgency practice was H. R. McMaster, who had commanded the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar and earned the praise of the president as well as ink in chapter 5 of the field manual for his use of the classic principles of “clear, hold, and build.” However, H. R. had been passed over the first time he was considered for promotion to brigadier general
despite his many contributions to the Army in intellectual and actual combat, a fact that had been noted by many younger officers who were concerned about the direction the Army was taking. McMaster was the canary in the mine shaft, and everyone below the rank of colonel was watching what would happen in his second opportunity. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to weigh in on his potential for stars.
I had made a firm argument to now–Secretary of the Army Peter Geren in early 2007, during an unusual one-on-one dinner during his visit to Fort Riley to check on the advisory training mission, that the Army needed to be appreciably bigger. A primary reason for the inability of the nation to successfully execute the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously was the stubborn refusal of the Bush administration to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps despite the continuing demand for ground troops. My argument was based on my own perception that young officers and senior noncommissioned officers, burned out after repeated yearlong combat tours with only a year off in between, were bailing out on the Army, seeing no improvement of this unsustainable pace in their future.
A bigger Army would not only relieve the strain on the force but would also be a huge psychological boost. It would show that someone in the Pentagon understood the problem and was taking action to fix it. Not long after our discussion at Fort Riley, and undoubtedly after others provided similar input, Pete Geren persuaded Secretary Gates to increase the size of the Army by 50,000 troops over the next several years. That decision, coupled with the drawdown in Iraq, over time relieved the constant pressure on the troops, but the long-term effects of fighting two prolonged counterinsurgency campaigns would scar the Army for at least a decade to come, with the damage visible in high divorce, suicide, and misconduct rates.