by Greg Jaffe
Nagl’s conclusions about Vietnam were not that different from those Petraeus had reached in his own dissertation a decade earlier. “In these dirty little wars,” Nagl wrote, “political and military tasks intertwine, and the objective is more often ‘nation building’ than the destruction of an enemy army.” Nagl’s work exemplified George Lincoln’s original conception of Sosh as a place that should challenge the Army’s conventional wisdom and prepare it intellectually for the rigors of modern warfare. In Iraq, new ideas were coming to an amazing degree from former Sosh professors, including Chiarelli, Petraeus, and Nagl.
When Casey took command in 2004, Nagl had been nine months into his yearlong deployment as the operations officer of a 700-soldier battalion in Khalidiyah, a poor Sunni city near Fallujah made up of block upon block of concrete houses surrounded by high mud walls. If Casey had asked, Nagl would have told him that his unit was losing. His men had minimal understanding of the culture and the centuries-old tribes that dominated the area. The police his battalion trained were routinely murdered, and most residents wanted nothing to do with the Iraqi or U.S. forces. “I don’t think we could have picked a more foreign place on earth to fight an insurgency,” he confessed.
On his way back to the United States in the fall of 2004 Nagl stopped by Al Faw Palace to see Grant Doty, a friend from Sosh who was working for Casey. He spoke briefly with Petraeus, whom he knew through Sosh connections. No one else had taken the time to talk to one of the Army’s most knowledgeable counterinsurgency experts and to hear his take on the war, on what was working in the field and what wasn’t. Nagl spent most of 2005 in the Pentagon, where his disillusionment grew. He railed to reporters and whoever else would listen that U.S. units were desperately short of interpreters. Often his battalion had dispatched patrols without any Arabic-speakers. “If soldiers can’t interact with the population, all they are doing is trolling for IEDs,” he said, using the military acronym for roadside bombs. He barraged Petraeus with e-mails complaining that the Army had no counterinsurgency doctrine and needed to ramp up an effort to write one immediately. And he worried that the military, just as in Vietnam, didn’t want to learn how to fight guerrilla wars. “Beware of the majors of Desert Storm,” he often said. These were officers who had fought in the 1991 tank battle and refused to believe there was any other type of war. It was the Army equivalent of “Don’t trust anybody over thirty.”
In northwestern Iraq, Colonel H. R. McMaster, the commander of a 3,500-soldier armored cavalry regiment, was leading his own rebellion in the summer of 2005. McMaster had long been a “water walker,” pegged early in his career, like Petraeus and Abizaid, as a future general. He had earned a Silver Star for his battlefield prowess in the Persian Gulf War. The Army’s official history of the conflict opened with a vivid description of his tank crew destroying a much larger Iraq formation: “McMaster spotted the tanks. ‘Fire, fire sabot,’ he yelled as he kicked up his tank’s metal seat and dropped inside to look through his thermal imager. His clipped command was a code that automatically launched his three crew mates into a well-rehearsed sequence of individual actions.”
After the 1991 war McMaster earned a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina and wrote an acclaimed book on Vietnam. Relying on recently declassified documents, Dereliction of Duty built a damning case that the Vietnam-era generals had caved in to President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, backing a war strategy they knew would fail. By the time McMaster was writing, Vietnam was no longer such an open wound, and General Henry Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, invited McMaster for breakfast at the Pentagon to talk to the military’s top four-stars about his research. Shelton had read the book on the recommendation of his executive officer, David Petraeus, then a colonel.
McMaster went on to work for Abizaid in Kosovo and at U.S. Central Command. Abizaid saw a little bit of himself in the young, intellectually restless officer. McMaster was emotional, stubborn, gracious, wickedly funny, full of boyish enthusiasm, and constantly questioning his commanders, especially in Iraq, where he led the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. “Why did the U.S. military have to retake the same cities from insurgents again and again?” he asked. Why had there been no theater reserve force in the country that could react to a surprise enemy offensive or exploit fleeting opportunities? Why had the enemy been allowed to maintain safe havens? They were legitimate questions, but they also drove his superiors crazy.
“You need to stop thinking strategically,” McMaster’s brigadier general boss in Mosul warned him in the summer of 2005. It was Army-speak for “Shut the hell up, Colonel, and worry about your little piece of the war.” His bosses sometimes had a point.
McMaster’s piece of the war was Tal Afar, a city of about a quarter million residents set on an ancient smuggling route near the Syrian border. Foreign fighters linked to Al Qaeda were using it as a staging area before heading off to Baghdad and Mosul. On the eve of an assault by McMaster’s regiment, General Casey flew in to hear his plan for retaking the city.
It was a tense time. In the weeks leading up to the operation, McMaster had asked for an extra battalion of about 800 soldiers to help clear the city’s southern district, a warren of muddy streets and alleys too narrow for the regiment’s tanks. He had expected a quick answer. After all, the attack into the city was the only major operation planned during the summer of 2005, and Tal Afar was key terrain for Al Qaeda. Instead he got no response.
Now the operation was days away and McMaster knew he was going to have to get by with fewer troops. He told Casey that he was going to position his forces in a sector adjacent to the troublesome southern district and try to draw the enemy fighters out so that they could be more easily killed. He didn’t mention the memos he’d written requesting the extra soldiers. It was too late to get them there before the attack was scheduled to kick off, anyway.
When the briefing was done the two officers hopped into an SUV for the short ride back to the airstrip where Casey’s plane was waiting. The regimental command post on the outskirts of Tal Afar was a big plywood building that looked like a beached ark. There was an old Saddam-era airstrip and several boxy brick buildings nearby. A single ribbon of blacktop led the five miles into the city. As they bumped down the rutted road toward the airfield, Casey told McMaster that he needed another battalion for his attack. After hearing the plan, Casey had reached the same conclusion as McMaster. The extra soldiers would drive out the insurgents in the densely packed southern portion of the city that had McMaster so worried. As he spoke, McMaster realized that his memos asking for more troops had been forwarded to Baghdad but had never made it up the chain of command to Casey.
Years later Casey would concede that such incidents were fairly common, and he suggested that his subordinate generals’ reluctance to ask for additional troops grew out of the Army’s can-do culture. “It’s our nature to get the job done with what we have,” he said. “And I was up against that all the time.” An extra infantry battalion was flown in to help McMaster hold the city but didn’t arrive in time for the invasion.
McMaster saw a bigger problem. President Bush wanted to transform Iraq into a model democracy for the Middle East and an ally in the war on terror. Realizing those lofty goals demanded a massive commitment of troops, money, and civilian expertise. But the Pentagon was moving in a different direction. Rumsfeld was consumed by a desire to leave. In Baghdad the military’s strategy was focused on handing over the fight to Iraqis.
In his mission statement for his regiment, McMaster laid out his main objective as defeating the enemy and setting “conditions for economic and political development.” His superiors asked him if he was setting a higher standard for his area than he had been given. To McMaster the conclusion was inescapable: the United States was not fully committed to winning. “We’re managing this war, not fighting it,” he complained.
In the summer of 2005, Casey summoned Colonel Bill Hix to his office. He had a special mis
sion for Hix: take one month and visit as many U.S. brigades and battalions as possible, then write a report grading the war effort. The two had forged an unusual relationship for a colonel and a four-star general. Hix, the son of a CIA operative, had spent most of his career in the Special Forces and had advised the Philippine military in its fight against Islamic guerrillas. Among the Americans in the palace, the bald, broad-shouldered colonel was the closest thing Casey could find to a counterinsurgency expert. He acted almost as a tutor, schooling Casey on a form of warfare he didn’t really understand. As Casey grew more comfortable, Hix evolved into a trusted advisor.
In Army terms, Hix was a “fireproof colonel.” He’d put in enough time to earn his full retirement pension and knew he was never going to make general. He served at his own pleasure and had nothing to lose. He and Casey frequently disagreed, particularly on the question of more troops, which Hix favored. “When I think I need more troops I will ask for them,” Casey would tell Hix. But Casey liked his candor.
Most of Hix’s time was spent in meetings or in his cubicle, where he worked fourteen-hour days, cranking out slides and writing briefing papers for Casey and the Pentagon. Sometimes Casey brought him along when he went out to meet units. But the trips provided only fleeting glimpses of Iraq. By the summer of 2005 Hix was desperate to get out of the palace and see the real war.
To accompany Hix on his inspection tour, he drafted Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces officer who had fought in El Salvador, earned a history doctorate from Harvard, and taught classes in guerrilla war at the Naval Postgraduate School. Sepp had arrived a few days earlier at Hix’s invitation to deliver a series of lectures to Casey’s staff on counterinsurgency operations. As soon as he learned about the study, Hix had dashed back to Sepp’s cubicle. His friend wasn’t there, so Hix scribbled a quick message on a Post-it note. “You owe me big, Bill,” it read.
The two visited thirty-one different units and evaluated them using a checklist of counterinsurgency best practices developed by Sepp. Successful armies isolated the civilian population from the enemy by providing security, stable government, a strong police force, and decent jobs. They built sophisticated intelligence networks, used the minimum amount of force necessary in raids, and offered amnesty and rehabilitation to former insurgents.
Hix and Sepp didn’t want the units to feel as though they were being graded. So they tended to ask the field commanders open-ended questions: What were their priorities? What were their biggest concerns? What was keeping them from succeeding? Their fifteen-page report reached a dire conclusion: most of the U.S. units that they visited were ineffective. In a handful of cases brigade and battalion commanders didn’t understand how to defeat an insurgency. One commander in restive Anbar Province strode into a meeting with them, lit a cigar, and propped his feet on his desk. “We got three today,” he told them proudly. For him it was all about the body count.
Even if units in the field did everything right, they still didn’t have the manpower they needed to win. There weren’t enough U.S. and Iraqi troops in the country to drive insurgents from their safe havens and prevent them from returning, the report found, echoing McMaster’s frequent complaint. The advisory teams were too small and inexperienced.
But the biggest shortcoming, the report found, was the lack of political and economic progress in the country. On those rare occasions when the government did make its presence felt outside of the Green Zone it displayed a pro-Shiite sectarian agenda that fueled the insurgency. If Casey wanted to fix the foundering war effort, he had to expand beyond training Iraqi troops and take on political and economic development in the country. Technically, the U.S. embassy was responsible for these areas. But the embassy was sorely lacking in money and manpower. Smart commanders tried to fill the gap, but they didn’t have the expertise to build local governments and jump-start the economy.
Casey needed control of all aspects of the counterinsurgency campaign, Hix and Sepp argued. There was a historical precedent for the power grab. In the latter days of the Vietnam War the United States placed the economic and political development in the country under the control of General Creighton Abrams, who took over from William Westmoreland. Some historians maintained that Abrams’s “one war” approach had produced positive results by the early 1970s. The shift had just taken place too late—after the American people and Congress had given up on the war.
In early September Hix and Sepp described their report’s findings for Casey and his senior staff. Sepp knew that Casey’s father and Creighton Abrams had been friends in Vietnam, and decided to take a chance by playing up the personal connection. “Sir, it is time to do what your father’s friend Creighton Abrams did and merge the civil and military effort in Iraq under a single director, which would be you,” he said. Casey set his hands on the conference table in front of him, tilted his head, and stared off into the distance. He didn’t say anything.
Hix warned that the U.S. military could build Army and police forces forever, but without economic and political progress they would eventually crumble. “All these Army and police forces are going to be like Wile E. Coyote going off a cliff without an economic and political foundation underneath them,” he said. Hix then turned up the pressure. He understood that governance and economics were the State Department’s turf. But if the United States lost, the blame wouldn’t fall on the secretary of state or the ambassador. It would fall on Casey. Only the Pentagon had the half-trillion-dollar-a-year budget and the manpower to deliver. “This is your war,” he told his boss.
A few days later Casey flew with his two advisors to central command headquarters in Qatar so that they could give Abizaid and his staff the same pitch. Abizaid had just come from watching a video shot by French journalists that showed insurgents setting up a roadside bomb as bystanders and police applauded. As long as U.S. troops were in Iraqi neighborhoods, the violence would continue, he believed. He listened intently to Hix.
“So you are telling me that we have a total absence of effective government at the local level in Iraq?” Abizaid asked.
“Sir, in some cases it’s worse than just an absence,” Hix replied. The Shiite-dominated government was targeting Sunnis and driving them into the insurgent ranks. Fixing the problem would require about 10,000 additional troops who would report to Casey and focus solely on economic development, infrastructure repair, and local governance. In Vietnam, a slightly smaller country, Abrams had used a force of about 7,000 soldiers and aid workers.
Casey sent the report to Rumsfeld, but he and Abizaid decided that asking for control of the economic and political aspects of the war effort wasn’t going to work. “I made the judgment that it was going to take an awful lot of energy to get it done and the likelihood of success was low,” Casey recalled. At the time the State Department was proposing building Provincial Reconstruction Teams to conduct development projects in each of the eighteen provinces. The effort consisted of only a few hundred Foreign Service officers and lacked the money to make a real difference. Still, Casey thought that the civilian-led teams were a reasonable first step. At least the State Department was trying. The answer was to make State do more, not to do everything himself.
Casey did adopt Hix’s recommendation to train incoming officers in the principles of counterinsurgency. He didn’t need to fight with Washington for permission to do it and it didn’t take very many extra troops. The one-week immersion course was a significant step forward for an Army that was receiving virtually no counterinsurgency training back in the United States. One officer cycling through an early class said that his unit’s preparation for Iraq had consisted of “kick in the door, two in the chest,” recalled Sepp. Casey’s classes preached the importance of using measured force to avoid alienating the Iraqi people and stressed the importance of mentoring Iraqi forces. Soldiers also received some instruction in Iraqi culture. Ideally such training would have occurred back in the United States, where there was more time. But the institutional Army, strained
by the heavy pace of deployments, was slow to adapt. “Because the Army won’t change itself, I am going to change it here in Iraq,” Casey had said. The first U.S. officers began passing through the school, which Casey playfully dubbed the “Hix Academy,” in November 2005.
When he left Iraq, Hix went to work in the Pentagon, where his frustration grew. In Washington, the Joint Staff, the State Department, and the Bush administration were willing to do just enough to prolong the war, he believed, but not enough to prevail. Their outlook on the war was “eerily similar to the escalatory minimalist approach” that had failed so miserably in Vietnam, Hix wrote in an e-mail to Casey in early 2006. “We need to rededicate ourselves to winning the war,” he added.
His critique was almost identical to McMaster’s in Tal Afar. Hix, however, had played a major role in helping Casey develop his strategy for Iraq, which focused on pushing Iraqis to take the lead in the fight, and he felt a measure of responsibility for its shortcomings. In retrospect he said that he was too quick to buy into a bit of decades-old wisdom from British colonel T. E. Lawrence that became a mantra for U.S. troops throughout Iraq in 2005 and 2006. “Do not try to do too much with your own hands,” Lawrence of Arabia had counseled. “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them.” By late 2005, Lawrence’s maxim was plastered on the wall of command posts throughout Iraq as if it were a religious commandment.