by Nathan Hodge
Fortunately, a boutique publisher in St. Petersburg, Florida, had stepped in to provide reprints of many of the classics. Hailer Publishing was founded by Jamie Hailer, a thirty-something devotee of military history and strategy who had a day job in the business planning department of General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, an ammunition manufacturer. Hailer had done graduate work at Missouri State University, where he first read Galula, and he had first toyed with the idea of starting a publishing company when he tried to find a copy of From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, a five-volume series on the history of the Royal Navy. When Hailer looked for a used set on the Internet, it priced out at $1,200.
But Hailer’s decision to launch a publishing venture was sealed in late 2004, when he read an article in Inside the Pentagon, a defense trade paper published in Washington. The reporter, Elaine Grossman, described the reading list that Colonel H. R. McMaster had prepared in advance of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment’s deployment to Iraq. On the top of that list was Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, but it was out of print.
Grossman had surveyed top officers, retired intelligence officials, and strategists about what was on their essential reading list, and found that some of the most enthusiastic suggestions were for hard-to-find books like Galula’s. “May I suggest that you run—not walk—to the Pentagon library and get in line” for Galula’s book, a retired CIA officer with Vietnam experience told Grossman. The book should be read as “a primer for how to win in Iraq.”2
Hailer decided to reprint the Galula book, as it seemed to fill the most urgent need. “Guys came back [from Iraq] and said, ‘What are we doing?’ ” Hailer later told me. “That’s what frustrated me: We are fighting a unconventional war, and all these books are out of print. It’s like taking an economics course and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is out of print.”
He found a copy in the University of South Florida library and tracked down the company that had acquired the book’s original publisher, and offered to pay royalties for reprint rights. The publisher agreed. Hailer then found a Florida firm that could make a high-quality scan of the original book and located a printer in Minnesota that could handle the job. By October 2005, the book had sold around twenty-four hundred copies. The Army’s Command and General Staff College had ordered fifteen hundred of them.3 The books were a key addition to the Fort Leavenworth bookstore.
Ricks later got a note from a friend at the Command and General Staff College who had asked a young officer he knew about Ricks’s talk. “Oh, that reporter?” the friend said. “He got up and mentioned some French guy and said we were stupid if we didn’t know who he was.”
In early 2006, a quiet revolt was gathering momentum at Fort Leavenworth, home to the Army’s Command and General Staff College, the midcareer school for Army officers. Located on the west bank of the Missouri River, this historic Army outpost was once the jumping-off point for the settlers headed west on the Santa Fe and Oregon trails; the wide trail ruts left by the thousands of wagons are still visible from the commanding bluffs above the river. The sturdy, nineteenth-century brick houses and manicured lawns give the place the feel of a Midwestern college, although the uniformed student body, Civil War cannons, and equestrian statues were a reminder of the place’s martial purpose. A stint running Fort Leavenworth was seen as something of a career killer—or at least not the place to be if you wanted to go on to become a four-star combatant commander or Army chief of staff. In October 2005, Lieutenant General David Petraeus began a new assignment commanding the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. Petraeus had returned to the United States after two and a half years in Iraq, first as commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division, then as the head of the Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq, which was charged with training Iraqi security forces. His predecessor at Fort Leavenworth, General William Wallace, had been promoted to the unglamorous job of running U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, which oversaw the service’s schools and training facilities.
Just a few months after Petraeus arrived at Fort Leavenworth, things took a dramatic turn for the worse in Iraq. On February 22, 2006, bombers struck the al-Askari mosque in Samarra. The mosque was a major Shia shrine, where the earthly remains of the tenth and eleventh imams were buried, and the attack, orchestrated by al-Qaeda in Iraq, had a very deliberate aim of starting a full-blown civil war in Iraq. In the weeks following the Samarra mosque bombing, a wave of sectarian reprisals swept Iraq. During one thirty-hour period alone, eighty-six bodies were found dumped on the street in Baghdad, with the bodies of many victims bearing signs of gruesome torture. Neighborhoods of the capital were being systematically ethnically cleansed.4
News of the Samarra mosque bombing reached Fort Leavenworth in late February of 2006, while Petraeus was hosting a conference to review the first draft of FM 3-24, the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual. The document was supposed to be much more than a professional handbook: It was supposed to serve as a template for reforming the Army, and fixing Iraq in the process. It was also intended to launch a broader conversation about reinventing government. The meeting, convened by Petraeus and Sarah Sewall of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was a chance to test-market the new counterinsurgency document to the broader foreign policy community. Representatives of other government agencies, the human rights community, think tanks, and even a few journalists were invited to offer critiques.
Work had begun in earnest on the new counterinsurgency manual in late 2005, when Conrad Crane, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who had graduated in the same West Point class as Petraeus (1974), brought together a small writing team to produce an early first draft. Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, the armor officer who wrote the influential Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, was a member of the team. Colonel Peter Mansoor, the armored brigade commander who had administered parts of Baghdad in 2003 and 2004, would later help revise the final version of the document. But the most remarkable thing about the writing process was the amount of input that came from nonmilitary people. Harvard’s Sewall played a unique role.
Sewall is not just a tenured academic but also a Pentagon and Washington policy insider. During the Clinton administration she served as the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance. Before that she served as senior foreign policy advisor to Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell on the Democratic Policy Committee and the Senate Arms Control Observer Group. Under Sewall’s leadership, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy had quietly emerged as an influential player in military and national security circles. In November 2005, working with the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, the Carr Center had cosponsored a colloquium on irregular warfare in Washington. Sewall invited Lieutenant Colonel Erik Kurilla, the commander of the First Battalion, Twenty-fourth Infantry Regiment, part of the Stryker Brigade that had recently policed Mosul, and other officers, but the panelists were not all military. To place emphasis on the issues of minimizing the use of force and reducing civilian harm, Sewall invited representatives of NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Refugees International, and the International Rescue Committee, all organizations that normally were reluctant to be associated with the military.
These groups often had an adversarial relationship with the military, but Sewall managed to persuade senior officers to sit at the same table with human rights advocates. Getting academics and representatives of nongovernmental organizations to show up was also a struggle. Tyler Moselle, a research associate at the Carr Center, helped Sewall work the phones to persuade nonmilitary participants to attend the conference. “We open up the window and try to rush as many people in the room and then close the window,” he said.
The role of the Kennedy School of Government was particularly important because the military and the
scholarly worlds had been at odds since the Vietnam War, and the estrangement and mistrust had continued for decades. Introduction of an all-volunteer military widened the rift, as did policies like the military’s ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in uniform. The Bush administration’s disastrous preemptive war against Iraq was not particularly popular with academics nor with human rights advocates, either. But Sewall and Moselle believed they were on a mission; they justified the Carr Center’s close collaboration with the military as working within the system to minimize the use of force and reduce civilian harm. When people asked Moselle to describe his job, he liked to say, “We try to humanize the military.”
But it was a two-way street. Petraeus and the counterinsurgents also needed the imprimatur of the Kennedy School. They wanted to reach policy wonks, think-tankers, and academics who would help shape the debate about armed nation building. Equally important, they wanted to cultivate prominent journalists. Peter Maass, the journalist who had written a thoughtful profile of Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl for the New York Times Magazine in 2004, shared a panel with Kurilla at the Carr Center’s 2005 conference on irregular warfare.
It was easy to understand why journalists gravitated to articulate officers with Ph.D.s such as Petraeus and Nagl. Counterinsurgency was an irresistible story of military reform. Smart counterinsurgents such as Colonel H. R. McMaster and Nagl favored a subtle, culturally nuanced approach that emphasized development work over violent action, and they found common cause with journalists who had witnessed firsthand U.S. troops’ uncomprehending first encounters with Iraqis. A subtle cultural prejudice may also have been at work. Sophisticated officers with Ph.D.s made for better protagonists than old-school knuckle draggers who preferred to kick down doors in a fruitless hunt for insurgents.
For Greg Jaffe, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, media-savvy officers such as Nagl—sometimes nicknamed “COINdinistas” because of the military’s inevitable reduction of the word “counterinsurgency” to an acronym, COIN—were an irresistible story. “The counterinsugency narrative became an interesting one to me when I was trying to figure out how the hell we were losing this war,” he told me. “And the COIN folks were offering compelling alternatives that you could write about.”
Jaffe was one of the reporters invited to the February 2006 drafting session for the counterinsurgency manual. “To be honest, I think a big part of that was not that they were desperate for our opinions, but they wanted to socialize the document to a certain extent,” he said. “And reporters are going to write about it if they have access to it and access to the people who are writing it.”
The military’s embrace of counterinsurgency was not, however, a strictly top-down affair. In many respects, it was a grassroots movement. As many career soldiers returned from frustrating first tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, they began searching for new intellectual guidance that would explain how to set things right.
In generations past, the military’s middle management—the noncommissioned officers, platoon leaders and company commanders—had limited say about how the military organized, trained, and equipped. They had few forums for a free and open discussion of the problems they faced in the field. Of course, they might consider submitting articles to military journals such as the Naval Institute’s Proceedings or the Army’s Parameters quarterly, but these publications have a fairly long lead time, limited space, and strict editorial guidelines. Professional conferences like the Association of the United States Army symposia offered some outlet for professional discussion, but little opportunity for dissident opinions.
In the post-9/11 era, however, a new generation of professional soldier was able tap the power of the Internet. In 2005 and 2006, as the official counterinsurgency doctrine took shape, the middle ranks of the military, the men and women who were most heavily engaged in nation building, began using Web 2.0 tools—digital communication, e-mail, and social networking—to share their experiences. And the shift to nation building took on a whole new momentum. In 2000, Army Majors Nate Allen and Tony Burgess created a Web site, Companycommand.com, that was modeled on a hunting-and-fishing discussion forum and was meant to serve as a professional forum for young officers. On Companycommand.com, officers could trade tips on everything from navigating Army bureaucracy to negotiating with village elders. The Web site, which allowed open discussion threads, quickly caught on; a year later, Allen and Burgess founded a site for lieutenants, Platoonleader.org.5
The sites were an extraordinary networking tool for junior officers and a medium for immediate and open exchange. The Army establishment, however, was terrified about these discussions taking place on the civilian Internet, potentially in full view of the enemy, although officers were supposed to be self-policing in virtual chat rooms. Eventually both sites were firewalled and brought onto Army servers. To log on, a person needed an Army Knowledge Online account, an official Army e-mail address. The forums continued to be useful for sharing practical advice, but they were not always the best venue for debate. Everything posted would be potentially visible to the person’s chain of command.
What the counterinsurgency movement needed was a more freewheeling and unmoderated forum. On official Defense Department sites, users were logged in under their full names and ranks, and people who held unpopular opinions or questioned established policies couldn’t do so without fear of retribution. Perhaps more important, the counterinsurgency proponents wanted a forum where they could engage communities outside the military: from academia, from nongovernmental organizations, even from the media. After all, nation building demanded civilian expertise as much as it required technical military proficiency.
At the senior level, there was Warlord Loop, an invitation-only e-mail list founded by a retired Army colonel, John Collins. The discussion group included senior military officers, some experienced NCOs, plus a smattering of civilian experts and even a few select reporters. But Warlord Loop was exclusive, limited to a few hundred members.
A new outlet appeared in 2005, with the publication of Small Wars Journal, an online magazine devoted to the study of counterinsurgency and internal war. Small Wars Journal originally looked more like a traditional outlet for scholarly writing and magazine-length articles, but the Small Wars Journal Web site also featured a resource page with reading lists, links to other agency Web sites and archival materials on everything from histories of British involvement in peacekeeping to small wars in the twentieth century. Very quickly, Small Wars Journal attracted an online audience, and it became home to a lively discussion forum and a blog.
The founders of Small Wars Journal, Dave Dilegge and Bill Nagle, had worked together at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia. The site indirectly evolved from the MOUT Homepage, a site originally developed by Dilegge when he was working as an analyst on urban warfare (the acronym MOUT stands for “military operations in urban terrain”). MOUT Homepage was a useful resource for a small community of military experts and scholars who studied urban warfare, and it gradually evolved into an online publication called the Urban Operations Journal. The publication was funded through the Defense Technical Information Center and was on an official site of the Defense Department.
Having an official site had its advantages. Dilegge and Nagle could post items stamped “For Official Use Only” (a designation often used to restrict the circulation of sensitive but unclassified government documents); they also posted after-action reports and other unclassified information that the military wanted to confine to the small community of urban operations specialists. But the official approval process on a government Web site made posting slow and was cumbersome. Dilegge found that it took only a few minutes to draft a post, but it took two to three days for it to go live. The site was not kept up-to-date, and with time, Urban Operations Journal became a dormant page.
After Iraq and Afghanistan, however, Dilegge and Nagle noticed a surge in interest in some of the topics once covered by Urban Operations Jo
urnal. In Iraq especially, bypassing the urban areas was no longer an option. It was central to the fight. They took the old template of the Urban Operations Journal and repurposed it. Small Wars Journal would be broader and more inclusive, and would cover the full range of issues: cultural awareness, civilian-led reconstruction and development, counterinsurgency theory and practice. The two men were skilled networkers, and were able to solicit contributions from rising stars within the community—Nagl and Bing West, a former Reagan defense official who wrote the cult Vietnam book The Village. Small Wars Journal became a must-read for people in uniform who were looking for answers to the problems they faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Small Wars Journal later had a rogue twin in Abu Muqawama, a blog founded in early 2007 by Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. If Small Wars Journal became an established forum for serious-minded discussion, Abu Muqawama was its hip, snarky counterpart. Exum, a native of east Tennessee and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, founded Abu Muqawama almost on a dare while on a year-long fellowship in Washington. The name was an inside joke: Exum, who had received a master’s degree at the American University of Beirut, was a student of Lebanese politics. Exum and his office-mate, Seth Wikas, kept a Hezbollah flag in their office, which features the phrase al-muqawamah al-islamiyah fi lubnan: “The Islamic resistance in Lebanon.” The nickname Abu Muqawama means “father of the resistance” in Arabic. The name was suggested by Wikas.
The first post described Abu Muqawama as “a resource and clearinghouse for information relating to contemporary insurgencies.” At first Exum used the pseudonymous blog to highlight links to articles on events in the Middle East and Iraq. Exum had written a serious memoir of combat, This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story from the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism. Now he quickly found his voice as a blogger; he had a talent for writing sharp, witty posts laced with pop culture references and subversive humor. The readership of the blog grew exponentially: When he began posting in the spring of 2007, he had around a hundred visitors a day; a year later, his readership had spiked to about three thousand a day. It was a wide and influential audience. Exum had a stable of serious contributors, and his site became both a serious discussion forum as well as a sort of gossip site—a Gawker for the counterinsurgency set.