Petraeus completed his Princeton Ph.D. thesis, The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of American Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era, in 1987. He concluded that, contrary to stereotypes, military officials in the wake of Vietnam had not been as hawkish as their civilian counterparts. He based this on an examination of historical case studies between Korea and Vietnam, a discussion of the Vietnam legacy and finally a review of the post-Vietnam military interventions—eleven in all—through the mid-eighties.
He found that from 1973 to 1986, military decision makers tended toward a more cautious approach than the president’s most hawkish principal civilian advisers in their advice on whether to commit troops. In his research, he highlighted the conclusions of Samuel Huntington, who, in The Soldier and the State, his seminal work on the history of the military profession and civil-military relations up to World War II and then from 1940 through the mid-1950s, found that military officials had been cautious professionals. As for the future, he offered three conclusions. First, small wars were more likely on the threat horizon than nuclear or other large-scale ground wars. Second, the military needed to be prepared, even if it was unlikely that decision makers would advise intervention. And third, that it was wiser, when possible, to use small teams of advisers than massive troop deployments to assist countries engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign, a conclusion he drew from his experience in Latin America.
But in assessing the failure in Vietnam, rather than pinning the blame on civilian leaders or reporters (as was in vogue among those in uniform at the time), he concluded, like Krepinevich, that the Army had fought the war in the wrong way. Instead of strategies like search-and-destroy, Army commanders would have been much better off with tactics that fell under the heading of counterinsurgency.
When his studies at Princeton and his teaching at West Point came to an end, Major Petraeus again joined his mentor General Galvin, who was to become the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), in Belgium. There were nearly 250,000 U.S. forces in Europe at that time, the vast majority of them stationed in West Germany. It was key terrain for, and the focus of, the U.S. military. Petraeus agreed to serve as Galvin’s military assistant under two conditions: first, that he could travel with Galvin and hear his boss deliver the speeches that Petraeus had drafted, and second, that he could be assigned to a tactical unit in Europe after a year as a speechwriter. He’d been away from troopers for five years and was anxious to return to the field.
In the meantime, he took lessons in NATO leadership. “The boss continues to amaze me even now,” Petraeus wrote to his mentor from the 509th, Nightingale, in January 1988. “As long as I’ve known him, [Galvin] has always, within a few months of taking command, initiated some project that proved to be truly visionary in terms of how important it later became. Here . . . it’s the NATO posture related to the intermediate nuclear forces agreement.”
The most important lesson Petraeus took, however, was one on civil-military relations and the responsibility of senior leaders in the wake of a policy decision. In a speech by Galvin one year after assuming command, he noted that inheriting the decision to accept the Nuclear Force Agreement constituted a “marching order” and meant that “it was then time for the military to move on, unless we felt we could not carry out the mission under the new arrangements”—meaning after the elimination of the intermediate-range missiles that were the first line of nuclear deterrence in Europe at the time.
PETRAEUS REJOINED the infantry as a battalion operations officer in the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), based in Schweinfurt, Germany. After a year there, which included the largest force-on-force exercise in NATO history, he was selected to become the brigade’s operations officer. He loved everything about large-scale maneuver warfare exercises and mechanized force training, Petraeus wrote in a letter to Keith Nightingale in the winter of 1988, with the exception of the relatively scripted conduct of live-fire training exercises. While he sought to increase the realism through variety in the scenarios, the predictability in such exercises would bother him for years.
But overall, Petraeus enjoyed his new post enormously. He and Holly liked living in a small German village with their two young children, and Petraeus relished his position as brigade operations officer. Then the phone rang. General Carl Vuono, the Army chief of staff, wanted him to fly to Washington immediately to interview for a job as his aide-de-camp. The Army chief of staff had heard about Petraeus from his current aide and had vetted Petraeus through Knowlton and Galvin. He was impressed with what he heard: conscientious, outgoing, smart, full of fresh ideas, positive. Vuono could deal with the rumors about the young officer’s ambitiousness if Petraeus would perform. “If the definition of a ticket puncher is a guy who seeks the hard job,” Vuono said, “well, then I want an Army of ticket punchers!” These would be Vuono’s last two years on active duty, and he wanted a top aide. “I needed the best,” Vuono said.
Petraeus was intrigued by the prospect but torn about leaving troops, until Galvin called him to counsel him on the opportunity. Petraeus responded in a letter: “As I mentioned, I’m torn over the prospect of leaving troops so soon, moving again, . . . etc. I had been concerned about your reaction to whichever decision I made on the aide job: if I fought the job, I was concerned you’d think I was putting career or family concerns ahead of the Army.” Back in Washington, Petraeus met the gruff Vuono for the first time. Vuono wanted to know how he felt about the job. Petraeus said he was in a “win-win” situation. “If I become your aide, I’ll learn a lot,” he said. “If you don’t hire me, I’ll still be the brigade S3, which I’d prefer!”
“I wouldn’t want you if you really wanted the job,” Vuono replied. “Report in three weeks.”
By August 1989, Petraeus had moved his family to Washington for his new vantage point at the highest level of the Army. Petraeus traveled the world with Vuono. A few months into the job, the first Bush administration launched Operation Just Cause in Panama to apprehend the nation’s outlaw strongman, Manuel Noriega. The mission was to protect citizens in Panama, ensure safe operation of the Panama Canal and support democratic institutions there. It was the most complex “contingency deployment” since Vietnam. “Commanders responsible had the opportunity to plan the fight and then fight the plan,” Vuono said in a January 1990 speech that Petraeus helped refine.
In between the Panama invasion and the deployment that began after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in August 1990, Vuono focused on preparing the Army for a full spectrum of future threats on the battlefield. The night before he was due to deliver an important “white paper” to a Defense Writers Group breakfast and subsequently across the entire Army, Vuono handed Petraeus the latest draft, noting that it still needed work. Petraeus pulled an all-nighter with Vuono’s speechwriters to refine the document, which laid out Vuono’s six imperatives for a “trained and ready” Army. Efforts like this endeared Petraeus to his superiors. He was able to provide strategic and operational recommendations, understand the thinking of his superiors and help them convey their ideas more persuasively.
Petraeus watched Vuono manage a highly complex plan to support the deployment of forces for what ultimately became the 1991 Gulf War. Vuono took him on three trips to the Gulf during that period and brought him to meetings with General Norman Schwarzkopf and the team at Central Command headquarters in Riyadh, which oversaw Operations Desert Shield and then Desert Storm. Petraeus desperately wanted to deploy to the Gulf and tried to get Vuono to release him. But the last thing Vuono was willing to do with the nation at war was give up his right hand.
After the war, Petraeus wrote a memo for Vuono outlining what he thought were shortcomings in the Army’s basic mechanized infantry battalion, including insufficient dismounted infantry training, headquarters companies that were too large and anti-tank companies that sucked up too m
any resources for what they provided. Vuono had Petraeus write a memo for him to sign and ordered the Army staff to conduct a review.
Vuono also came to value his young aide as a motivator. Petraeus once lectured him at the end of a long and exhausting day that he simply had to be at his best during a speaking engagement that night in Louisville. “‘Chief, I know you’re tired; we’re all tired,’” Vuono remembers Petraeus telling him. “‘I know you gave six speeches already today and flew across the country. But that group tonight—they don’t know you gave six speeches. They don’t know where you’ve been today. They just know you’re the chief of staff of the Army. This is the one and only time that they will ever hear a CSA.’” Vuono got it. “I said, ‘All right, let’s go,’” he recalled. “I gave a helluva speech!”
As Petraeus began to mentally prepare himself for a return to the infantry, he watched as Vuono focused on building a “trained and ready” Army. Vuono believed in developing key themes and ideas and, through relentless communication, he drilled them into every engagement. Petraeus’s concept of four tasks of strategic leadership—get the big ideas right, communicate them effectively, aggressively oversee their uniform implementation, and create a feedback loop to measure progress and refine the big ideas—evolved directly from Vuono.
To improve training for low-intensity conflict, Vuono directed a colonel named Jack Keane, a barrel-chested Irishman and paratrooper from New York City with a master’s degree in philosophy, to develop a new training center for light infantry that had been established at Fort Chaffee, Louisiana, the Joint Readiness Training Center. Keane, who had served as a platoon leader in Vietnam, found himself among a small group of Army leaders who had concluded by the late 1980s that the future of warfare, with the Cold War coming to a close, would most likely involve low-intensity conflict—peacekeeping and counterinsurgency operations. Keane would retire as the four-star Army vice chief of staff and go on, in retirement, to play a key role in advocating for the surge in Iraq.
Petraeus first met Keane on one of Vuono’s trips to the new training center at Fort Polk. Keane quickly realized he could gain valuable insights on Vuono’s thinking from his young aide. “He was respectful to people more senior than him, but not intimidated and not arrogant,” Keane said of Petraeus. “We immediately had a visceral connection,” Keane said. Petraeus’s time in Central America with Galvin had cemented his belief that small wars were the threat of the future. The new training center Keane had established for Vuono would be the proving ground for important new light infantry tactics in an Army that for decades had focused on armor and mechanized infantry for its conventional warfare readiness. Keane would soon become a key Petraeus mentor as well.
As Vuono’s tenure as chief came to a close in July 1991, Petraeus eagerly awaited release of a new list of lieutenant colonels selected for battalion command. He had his eye on a unit in the 101st Airborne Division. It had just returned from Iraq, where its soldiers had helped cut off a Republican Guard unit’s retreat into Kuwait.
DURING PETRAEUS’S PRESS engagements in Afghanistan in mid-August 2010, reporters pressed him on his feelings about the drawdown scheduled for the following July. During his Meet the Press interview, Petraeus noted that the extent of the drawdown would be based on conditions on the ground and not be any kind of precipitous pullout. When Petraeus was asked whether he could foresee telling the president next July that conditions did not allow for a drawdown, he responded that it was not inconceivable, noting that the plan, however, was clear and that the intent certainly was to execute it.
Defense secretary Robert Gates took a somewhat different line the following day in Washington, saying in an interview that there was no question in anyone’s mind that at least a modest drawdown would begin in July 2011. Representative Jane Harman, the California Democrat, and Michael O’Hanlon, a moderate Democrat and defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, took Gates’s argument one step further, calling for Obama to explicitly state how many troops could come out in July 2011. This would assuage fears that the war was unending while demonstrating that the drawdown would not be precipitous. Reducing troop strength from 100,000 to 80,000 by the end of 2011 struck them as reasonable. But Petraeus, from his command of the surge in Iraq, knew that counterinsurgency operations required boots on the ground, and lots of them and that making commitments to draw down a specific number 18 months hence was unwise. No one was better at holding and solidifying gains at the district and village level than American soldiers, and he was reluctant to make promises or predictions so far in advance about the number of Americans that might be sent home.
Part of the sensitivity stemmed from Obama’s televised address to the nation on August 31, in which he announced the end of combat operations in Iraq after seven and a half years. Petraeus and his aides were listening for a strong statement of resolve from the president on Afghanistan. They got the resolve they were hoping for—and an unambiguous commitment to draw down forces the following July. “Now, as we approach our tenth year of combat in Afghanistan, there are those who are understandably asking tough questions about our mission there,” the president said from the Oval Office.
But we must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, al-Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We will disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists. And because of our drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to apply the resources necessary to go on offense. In fact, over the last nineteen months, nearly a dozen al-Qaeda leaders—and hundreds of al-Qaeda’s extremist allies—have been killed or captured around the world.
Within Afghanistan, I have ordered the deployment of additional troops who—under the command of General David Petraeus—are fighting to break the Taliban’s momentum. As with the surge in Iraq, these forces will be in place for a limited time to provide space for the Afghans to build their capacity and secure their own future. But, as was the case in Iraq, we cannot do for Afghans what they must ultimately do for themselves. That’s why we are training Afghan Security Forces and supporting a political resolution to Afghanistan’s problems. . . . The pace of our troop reductions will be determined by conditions on the ground, and our support for Afghanistan will endure. But make no mistake: This transition will begin—because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.
The Afghans would also ultimately be responsible for another force fueling the Taliban’s resurgence: the corruption in Hamid Karzai’s government. On the eve of Obama’s speech, the story broke that Karzai had fired one of the most senior prosecutors in Afghanistan, Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar, for refusing to back away from corruption investigations involving senior members of Karzai’s government. Faqiryar’s staff had been probing seventeen of Karzai’s cabinet members, five provincial governors and three ambassadors. Compounding the problem was the inconvenient coincidence that one of those officials under investigation, Mohammed Zia Salehi, chief of administration for Afghanistan’s National Security Council, had reportedly been on the CIA’s payroll for years.
Karzai’s government was considered one of the world’s most corrupt, and Karzai’s seeming inability to address that challenge was fueling deep concern inside the Obama administration about the worthiness of its Afghan partner. In early August, Karzai ordered an investigation of two units the United States had established to stop Afghan officials from smuggling millions out of the country and building mansions in the United Arab Emirates. Karzai ordered the probes following the arrest of Salehi, one of his senior aides, for allegedly soliciting bribes to help block a corruption investigation of a financial firm. Salehi called Karzai from jail and was freed. Shortly after Petraeus’s arrival in early July, a nonprofit group called Integrity Watch Afghanistan reported survey results showing that corruption had doubled since 2006, presumably in direct proportion to the amou
nt of money flowing into the country, with an estimated $1 billion in bribes paid in 2009 alone. The survey was based on interviews with 6,500 Afghans. One in seven said they had experienced bribery in their daily lives, and one in four families reported that they had been forced to pay bribes to receive government services.
Petraeus adopted a long-term approach to the urgent concern of corruption, viewing it as a cultural issue that it would take a generation or more to overcome. Other U.S. leaders were not so patient. Just a year earlier, Ambassador Eikenberry had warned President Obama against sending more troops because of corruption. But Petraeus thought improvement was possible, and he knew just the officer to lead the effort. On the day in late June that Obama asked him to take command in Afghanistan, Petraeus had already decided to take Brigadier General H.R. McMaster with him.
A rugby player with a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, McMaster was a charismatic, freethinking officer who had demonstrated the potential of classical counterinsurgency doctrine in Tal Afar, in northern Iraq in 2005, long before COIN became the Army’s dominant approach during the surge in 2007. McMaster instinctively preached respect for the Iraqi people and dispersed his troops in small outposts throughout the city. McMaster was the kind of officer who would embrace one particular Petraeus mantra, the final imperative in the recently issued counterinsurgency guidance:
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