David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War

The author David Kaplan uses "Insurgent" as a metaphor to show how those recognizing the need for different strategies to fight insurgencies (as compared to full scale wars) were themselves insurgents within the US military. While there are many others, Kaplan credits David Petraeus as the key exponent of the new thinking.

Kaplan places the beginnings of COIN (counter-insurgency strategies) at post- World War II West Point where a curriculum which added some liberal arts courses (sociology, foreign affairs, etc.) was introduced. The program, often called the "Lincoln Brigade" (named for its founder George "Abe" Lincoln) grew and as its graduates went on to Princeton and other ivies. Through it, younger officers had a much broader base of intellectual resources than their older superiors.

The young officers with no roots in Vietnam could appraise that war from a distance. They saw it as an insurgency, fought by US generals as though it was a "tank war" - a war of armies with heavy military equipment fighting each other. The COIN supporters saw a lion bothered by flies needing a different strategy than that used for warring with an elephant.

The Army's top leadership was not interested in any reappraisal of strategy. Some of it was Vietnam fatigue, some vested interest in the past or status quo, and some felt the winning of "hearts and minds" and the rebuilding strategies were outside of an armed services mission. An early COIN theorist, Andrew Krepinevich essentially ended his career with his 1986 work: "The Army and Vietnam", demonstrating the power of the resistors.

With all the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the stage was set for Petraeus, John Nagl, Eliot Cohen and the Australian Dave Kilcullen and a host of other "COINdanistas" to introduce the concepts. Kapan takes the reader through the many scenes such as how Petraeus comes to write the field manual, how General Odiero, was converted and how General McCrystal's heavy handed style was received in Afghanistan. Through it all, the lay person learns a lot about how the military works, such as how policy gets written and the importance of its promotion panel and how someone gets on it.

Most of the events take place during the Bush years and his absence from the text isn't apparent until the Obama years where the president's engagement is such that it is impossible to miss contrast. One thing missing, to a lay person, is the appointment of Robert Gates. While Kaplan discusses how key positions were filled and why, Gates merely comes to the top job (his overwhelming Senate approval vote is noted) but there is no discussion as to how and why he was nominated.

There is a lot of material in this book. The book is short for its topic. It is dense, and each page is important to the narrative - there is no "filler". For those interested in the military policy it is a must read.

Kaplan opens with a very brief reference to the Iraq War in 1991 - heavy tank on tank combat, with the U.S. decisively winning within 100 hours. More significantly, Kaplan also sees it as the end of head-to-head combat and its stress on superior firepower, and the motivation for and beginning of Lt. John Nagl's (1988 West Point graduate) study of a new type of war, similar to that we'd unsuccessfully fought in Vietnam. Graduate work at Oxford led to a doctoral dissertation and publication of a book - his weapon in a policy war within the military. He sought and found allies, mainly fellow Army officers, along with a few marines and civilian defense analysts who were reaching similar conclusions. Their goal - reviving counter-insurgency thinking and making it a major strand, perhaps even centerpiece, of military strategy. To do so, however, they had to overhaul the institutional culture of the U.S. military. At the time, its newest leaders mostly came from West Point - where a few years previously a cadet had joking proposed a new motto: "Two Hundred Years of Tradition, Unhindered by Progress."

The 21st century soon brought a need for this new thinking - in Iraq and Afghanistan. Previously another West Pointer, George Lincoln, suggested after WWII ended that the Army needed officers with three heads - political, economic, and military. Lincoln became head of Social Sciences at West Point, and encouraged critical inquiry by students. (Asking questions and talking back was not an Army attribute.) Lincoln also solidified ongoing support for this new elite enclave with a rule allowing outstanding students to study at a civilian graduate school, then return to teach at West Point. When alumni-officers were appointed to high-level positions, they'd usually phone the department chair and ask for the most promising junior faculty members to come work as their assistants.

David Petraeus (West Point, 1974) was known to be highly competitive. While at West Point, each cadet's grades were posted publicly after every test, and the seating arrangements in each classroom altered accordingly - highest scorers in the front row, lowest in the back. A cadet's rank also determined how good his seats were during football season, who got first pick of assignments upon graduating, and if he returned to teach, his class rank would determine the size and quality of faculty housing awarded.

During Petraeus' first year, he participated in soccer and skiing, neglecting his studies (#161 out of class of a few more than 800). During his second year, he got serious - targeting a full medical scholarship awarded to the top nine graduates. Midway through his senior year he was one of the top 5%, #6 in the pre-med program. By graduation, however, he'd decided he didn't want to be a doctor and elected infantry instead. He was particularly keen to become a Ranger. (He finished first in his group.)

Then it was an assignment to an Airborne Battalion in Italy, after which he was moved to France. There he read about a local French military hero, General Bigeard, one of the last to be captured at Dien Bien Phu. General Bigeard had noted that the Viet Minh had nothing to do with traditional warfare - instead it was politics, propaganda, faith, and agrarian reform. In other words, their type of war was not just clashes of arms but also struggles over ideology and economic well-being. (One of Mao's generals wrote that revolutionary war is "20% military action and 80% political") It was a competition for the loyalty, or at least complicity, of the local population.

Petreus kept reading, following the links - from Bigeard to Bernard Fall to Retired French officer David Galula and his "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice."

Insurgents, animated by ideological cause, could sow disorder anywhere, with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the government or building up parallel structures of governance that would grow stronger until the established order collapsed. Meanwhile, protectors of the existing regime must maintain order everywhere. The advantage, at least initially, would be with the insurgents. Thus, counterinsurgents must also live among the people - isolating them from the insurgency, keeping the area secure and earning their trust so they'd provide intelligence about the identity and whereabouts of the surviving rebels. A mimeograph machine could be more useful than a machine gun, a soldier trained as a pediatrician more important than a mortar, cement more valuable than barbed wire. This clearing would be accomplished one area at a time, leaving enough troops behind won-over areas when moving on to new areas. The primary weapon needed was highly mobile infantry, not heavy tanks or pilots dropping bombs.

Eventually Petraeus won a fellowship to Princeton. There he received a D on his first economics test and a B on his first political science paper. Realizing he was now on a higher intellectual playing field, he studied harder - and the As resumed, finishing the coursework for a PhD in two years, then moving back to West Point to teach and write his dissertation in which he made a case for building up light infantry and preparing to fight more insurgencies.

Fast forward to the spring of 1987 - Petraeus and Nagl meet at West Point, then Nagle shares a desk with Petraeus in Europe while Nagle writes a senior these under Petraeus' supervision. After graduating, Nagl commanded a tank company in a training exercise at Fort Irwin that was supposed to defend against Russians using older U.S. tanks (similar to those used by the Russians). However, some of the 'Russian' soldiers dismounted from their tanks and managed to surround and obliterate Nagl's unit. Nagl began thinking 'What if the next real enemies were more skilled than the Iraqis had been?'

Nagl returned to Oxford, studied more works on counter-insurgency, and wrote his own dissertation. Part of his learning involved comparing why the British eventually won in Malaysia, while the U.S. failed in Vietnam. The first lesson was that the British commander, General Templar, began by directing the compilation of a book summarizing prior experiences fighting in Malaysia, while the Americans never did. It was simply 'Annihilation' from the start; in 1997, nothing had changed.

'War as usual' continued to be the American way as Rumsfeld led the planning for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. The only 'change' Rumsfeld wanted was to make war more efficient. Greater mobility, fewer resources, 'shock and awe bombing, and a quick ending. No consideration of what happened next. When Baghdad fell in early April, General Franks declared that most troops would be home by summer.

Petraeus arrived in 2003 Mosul, Iraq as commander of the 101st Airborne. Fighting was over, but the city was in a shambles, without water, electricity, or sanitation services. 'We're going to do nation-building' he told his assembled troops. (The 'n-word' was unofficially forbidden.) Contacts were made with local tribal chiefs, ex-military officers, and business leaders who might be cooperative. Petraeus chaired a six-hour meeting with emerging leaders to work out an election plan that ensured even representation of districts, tribes, and ethnic groups. Then he spent a few hours/day for nearly a week vetting each prospective candidate, rejecting those who didn't meet agreed-upon criteria or still seemed loyal to Saddam. Meanwhile, staff officers set up a center to restore basic services and institutions. About six weeks later gas was available at stations where Americans stood guard, a month later electricity and sanitation services 90% restored. University classes graduated with only a few weeks delay.

The idea was not to get the people of northern Iraq to love America; rather it was to get a critical mass of those people to feel a stake of ownership in the new Iraq. His plan was nearly wrecked in mid-May when Paul Bremer banned all but the lowliest members of the Baath Party from holding any government job, and disbanded the Iraqi army. In the short term, this meant the shutdown of Mosul University and the suspension of the provincial councils. After Bremer visited Mosul, having heard things were going well there, Petraeus put on a grand show and persuaded Bremer to exempt that province from the order banning Baathists from government positions - demanding only that their agreement be kept secret.

Petraeus (and other generals) used Saddam's cash, discovered in his various palaces to subsidize neighborhood services, bribe local compensation, and pay compensation to people whose houses had been destroyed or family members killed needlessly. ("Money is ammunition.") His men also performed conventional military operations - patrolling the streets (the first principle in any counterinsurgency guide was to make the local people feel secure), raiding weapons caches, gathering intelligence, and sometimes shooting and killing. Petraeus insisted on restraints - the troops were not to fly American flags on their vehicles, raids were mounted only on specific homes and buildings that intelligence had firmly identified as harboring insurgents.

By the summer, the insurgency emerged from back rooms - the city was home to at least 40 retired Iraqi generals and hundreds of ex-soldiers. And then the American soldiers were ordered home - including Petraeus's division. These new, inexperienced units may have given the militias a freer ride than they otherwise would have had. The 18,000 troops of the 101st Division were replaced by just 9,000 - and no idea of what Petraeus's team had been doing. Data and memoranda of operations and a guide to the players were left behind - and ignored. Instead, it was back to surrounding whole neighborhoods, pounding down doors in the middle of the night, and killing suspected insurgents. When Petraeus's assistant made a speech at Cornell criticizing these methods, he was sidelined by those higher up.

One week before American troops entered Baghdad and Hussein's regime imploded, a retired Marine colonel named Gary Anderson wrote an op-ed piece predicting that after Saddam's inevitable defeat in the conventional war, he'd shift to a protracted guerrilla war against the occupation in hopes the Americans would tire and leave.

All cadets at Australia's equivalent of West Point were required to learn an Asian language. David Kilcullen also found studying former guerrilla conflicts fascinating, and took a special interest in a new extremist Islamist insurgency that was loosely affiliated with al Qaeda. After interviewing a few of them, he sense that they, like him, wanted a sense of adventure, being in the big movement of history. He regarded the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a serious strategic error, along the lines of Hitler invading Russia in 1941 without having defeated Britain first.

By May 2004, the insurgency's existence could no longer be denied. And it wasn't an isolated instance - a few years prior Special Forces teams were deployed in 152 countries and foreign territories, to deal with everything from clearing land mines, to capturing drug lords, to distributing food, and fighting insurgents.

October 20, 2005 Petraeus took command at Ft. Leavenworth - its supervision of numerous training commands allowed Petraeus the opportunity to impact Army culture. Early on, Petraeus visited Fort Sill to observe training of field artillery officers about to be promoted to captain. They were being trained to call in mortar fire in Baghdad, even though the staff sergeant operating the simulator and Petraeus knew mortars used thusly would miss targets and kill many civilians. Petraeus shut the exercise down. There were similar problems at other training sites, and some of those programs were already being rewritten by Iraq War returnees; Petraeus approved.

He also saw his new assignment as an opportunity to write a new Army field manual on counterinsurgency. His predecessor, Lt. Gen Scott Wallace, had already initiated updating field manuals. Some of Petraeus' foundation ideas included: 1)Do not try to do too much with your own hands . . . Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war . . you are there to help them, not win it for them. 2)Every army of liberation has a half-life, beyond which it turns into an army of occupation. This half-life can be extended through humanitarian projects, but it's still a race against time. The people will come to see checkpoints as too inconvenient, helicopters as too noisy, accidental killings and mistaken detentions as too appalling - and the bloom wears off. 3)Money is ammunition. The trick is not just to scatter money around, but to focus on the most urgent needs and on agents who can spend it most shrewdly. 4)The point of 'winning hearts and minds' is not to make the Iraqi people love or thank us but rather to ensure they have a stake in the success of the new Iraq. 5)Before carrying out a military operation, an officer should ask 'Will this operation take more bad guys off the street than it creates by the way its conducted?' 6)The key in these kinds of operations is to have good intelligence, most from human sources on the ground. Petraeus' men knocked on doors, didn't break them down or cordon off whole neighborhoods. 7)Defeating insurgents requires more than just military operation. There must also efforts to establish a political environment that helps reduce support for the insurgents and undermines the attraction of whatever ideology they espouse. These efforts include economic recovery, education, and supplying basic services. 8)It is important to cultivate Iraqi leaders who are seen by their people as legitimate at all levels. 9)Front-line soldiers, including corporals, have to make strategic decisions, and must be trained how to think strategically ahead of time. 10)The critical job for a commander is to 'set the right tone.' If he's seen to be more enthusiastic about shooting bad guys than handing out aid or negotiating with tribal leaders, his men will take that as a cue to do the same.

Petraeus then directed John Nagl to rewrite the Army's new counterinsurgency field manual. After it was completed came the task of 'winning hearts and minds' within the military to support and endorse it. Petraeus pursued endorsements from all branches of the Army, other military services, civilian agencies experienced in overseas reconstruction, and from critical segments of the public. Hopefully this would both provide support for giving the new policies a chance (and achieving victory). He invited his Marine Corps counterpart (Lt. General Jim Mattis) to take part in a conference and eventually cosign the manual, officials from the CIA, State Department, and AID, along with former Special Forces personnel who'd done counterinsurgency in El Salvador and Vietnam. And he invited the press. The conference would be 2/23/2006 - inside Ft. Leavenworth, and co-sponsored by a human-rights advocate from Harvard. Those who had written individual chapters presented their materials. It was emphasized that counterinsurgency needed to be viewed as a matter of multiplication, not addition - military TIMES civilian government TIMES judicial, and if one of those factors was zero the whole was as well.

The range of invitees included some known to be likely critics - their input, as well as that of others, was taken into account and incorporated into revising the manual. Supporters, then or later, included General Casey, Australia's Dave Kilcullen, H.R. McMaster, Lt. Col. John Nagl, General Shelton, Eliot Cohen. An obvious opponent - Rumsfeld; another turned out to be the Army Intelligence Center - upset at the new doctrine's decentralization of intelligence-gathering, a threat to its own core role. Pressured by General Schoomaker to get the mail out, Petraeus ordered the two-star head at Ft. Huachuca to 'get on board.'

Iraq was now spiraling out of control - civil war, brought on by Maliki's allowing Shiite's to dominate and abuse the Sunni population. The Sunni Arabs, excluded from power, were hell-bent on fragmenting the country so they could control at least a chunk of it - even if that involved allying with foreign jihadists. Counterinsurgency was supposed to help make the government more effective - but the Iraqi government's aims were different from/hostile to those of America's. And the solution would not be found in turning things over to the Iraqi government. January 4, 2007 Petraeus was named the new commander of forces in Iraq, and Bush II stated our new policy would be to HOLD areas that had been CLEARED.

Petraeus ordered the construction of concrete walls throughout Baghdad to separate Sunni from Shia neighborhoods, stopped all support for the Shia brigades that were killing Sunnis, co-opted Sunni insurgents into an alliance of convenience against jihadists by paying them to do so ('site security') without telling the president, Congress, or anyone else in Washington (he had total discretion), worked to undermine Sadr's relationship with Maliki, encouraged troops to get out of their vehicles and mingle. When U.S. force strength reached five brigades, Petraeus and Odiorne were able to disrupt bomb-making, attack Sadr City (persuading many Sunnis the U.S. weren't taking the Shia's side), with sectarian and IED attacks dropping sharply.

However, not all the improvement could be credited to Petraeus and the Americans. Many areas of violence had already been 'cleared' through ethnic cleansing and exile, hundreds of thousands of Sunnis had abandoned their homes under threats of death, Maliki had agreed to the U.S. assault on Shia militias partly because he was realizing the Mahdi Army was at least as much of a threat as an ally, and many Shiites had affiliated with the Americans simply because they knew they were losing the war with the Shiites.

Fall 2007 Petraeus chaired the promotion board the recommended current colonels for promotion to brigadier. The year before 9 of the 38 new one-stars had been executive officers, and in most instances not a combat commander. Only four of the 40 rewarded by the Petraeus board were executive officers, and all had served commanders directly involved in the war. H.R. McMaster was one.

Then came a new president - Obama wanted out of the U.S., and the Bush-Maliki agreement requiring all U.S. forces to withdraw by the end of 2011 provided the perfect platform. Now the focus would shift to Afghanistan.

A must read for serious students of the American way of war and the evolution of military doctrine - and an enjoyable read as well. Kaplan opens by describing a tank battle from the `91 Gulf War. It wasn't much of a battle and demonstrated the folly of the American Army's ceaseless preparation for big wars. An emphasis on counterinsurgency grew out of the realization by a cadre of military thinkers that preponderance of conflicts in the future would be `small wars'. These wars would be long and messy, and the American Army was ill-prepared for them. This stood in sharp contrast to the type of conflicts that the Department of Defense was forecasting, namely network-centric warfare that could swiftly defeat threats wherever they might arise. As Iraq and Afghanistan devolved from decisive victories into protracted quagmires, translating COIN thinking into doctrine took on a sense of urgency. Its application, however, produced mixed results. The problems arose less from the doctrine itself, and more from how the very nature of counterinsurgencies contrasts with the preferred American way of war - quick and decisive. The COINdistas arguably saved the American military from failure in Iraq but the cost in blood and treasure was too high to repeat on the same scale in Afghanistan. In neither conflict was COIN able to resolve the fundamental political tensions driving the instability. As this decade of conflict draws to a close, the American military again faces a dichotomy between how it wants to fight wars and the nature of future wars.

This book would lead one to believe Petraeus and some of his little friends invented counterinsurgency tactics all by themselves and the mean ol’ stupid ol’ generals didn’t even want to win in Iraq. If you believe that, I’ve got this great lot for sale in the swamps of Florida.

Counterinsurgency is not new. The army should always be preparing for the greatest threat at the time. Moslem terrorists need to be dealt with, but they do not represent the threat that Several nation’s conventional forces do. Vietnam, for example, occurred when the army was preparing to resist Soviet invasion of Europe…..perhaps even with tactical nukes.

When called upon to go to Vietnam we read (yes Petraeus was not the only one who could read) the “Marx brothers” --Mao, Che and Giap-- as they have been called by Kaplan. (wish I’d thought of that) We read Dixon and Heilbrunn. We read Fall. We read Pike. We read Larteguy. We read Trinquier. We read Banks. Yes, we studied. Why we even had a field manual.

Vietnam is grossly misunderstood. Vietnam did not fall to guerrilla warfare. It fell to a conventional invasion force with guns, tanks, and planes. The guerrillas had been, thanks a great deal to their having been squandered during the “general offensive” that didn’t turn out to be too general during Tet ’68, pretty well eliminated.

The principles of counterinsurgency are actually quite simple: The host country must purge incompetent and corrupt people from the government. They must have agrarian reform. Good luck with these. Then the US must not elect any politicians not willing to stay the course and finish the job. Good luck with this one too. Simple in principle, somewhat difficult in practice.

Bottom line: If you don’t know anything about counterinsurgency--- save your money. If you do know something, about it---save your blood pressure.

I chose this book because I was interested in an objective summary of what was occurring in Afghanistan under Gen Petraeus's leadership. The book did not disappoint, although the subject matter was much more in depth than just the war in Afghanistan. My last exposure to major tactical shifts was under the air land battle concept, (which I thought was revolutionary). Now the thinking has evolved to the counter insurgency model. The author was totally objective in portraying the pros and cons of the various strategy's and accurately described the subtle coup that evolved on the part of a select group of military academics who favored a restructuring of forces in order to meet counter insurgency threats and wars. As a civilian with limited exposure to the insider politics in the military; the book was an eye opener ! What was surprising was the passion that each side felt toward visions of how future wars were to be fought. After reading the book, I could not form an opinion on the merits for force structure change. World events happen at lightening speed, and the US has to be ready for any contingency, counter insurgency appears to be only one of the many threats. The book puts forth substantive points that are thought provoking and all with merit. This was an excellent book in all respects and highly entertaining as the thought processes and politics within the Army were shown from a personal perspective from the players who were attempting to accelerate change.

This book is a telling story about the lack of flexibility and compassion for most military above the rank of major. People like Donald Rumsfeld should be tried for involuntary manslaughter for their total lack of concern for the enlisted troops and the lower ranking commissioned officers serving our Country.

I write that this is a heart breaking book to read because as the student of insurgencies/counterinsurgency particuarly the Vietnam War now our nations second oldest war it is hart breaking to watch and learn that we forgot all of our hard learned institutional knowledge from Vietnam and even more recent and successfully won counterinsurgencies such as El Salvador. I personally believe that the COINISTas lead by Gen. Petraus and trubadored by then Major Nagl were much overly self congratulatory for having reinvented the wheel when it comes to COIN all they really did was rediscover it by reading a wee bit of history and talking to a few old grisled SF and USMC vets and then mugging for the spot light. That, hubris, can be forgiven what cannot be forgiven is that it was not until 2007, 3 plus years into the war in Iraq that we began with the surge to change our strategy over there prior to that we were using "firepower," and were incorrectlry trying to "kill our way out of it." It was not until we sent Gen. Patraus to Afghanistan that we started applying what was by then the blatently correct strategy to that theatre of war. It's all so infuriating. How many young patriotic American men and women came home in body bags who shouldnt hav if we did things right that were fundinmental from the beginning? Ahhh!!! By the waay Lt. Col. Nagl must have pissed off some seriously powerful people insidee and outsie the Army to have only retired a Lt. Col. he was the principal author of the Army/USMC COIn manual!

There is a glaring mistake in this book it describes how the church which sits atop the cemetery grounds at West Point is 'the soul of West Point.' I humbly disagree. The soul of west Point is the cemetery itself.

I visited the cemetery today. My father dropped me off near the back gate and went to park the car. I walked in I began reading the headstone they were new from our war on terror. I got three headstones in and began to weep. I started to cry like a little boy as I came across the headstone of a very young 2nd Lt. named Emily. she was younger than I was born a few years after me. I was moved by how her headstone was covered in stones and coins, and rocks. Some said 'smile,' 'Boston rocks,' 'happy birthday,' 'believe.' I thought of all the birthdays she will never again get to celebrate. As everything she will never again get to do that we take for granted registered with me I began to sob harder despite trying to hold back my tears. I had had enough I raced out of the gate a few steps away. Outside the gate away from the brutal reality of it all I began to breath easier and lit a cigarette. My father was now walking in and I went back in with him. I got to Emily's grave and began to sob and again. I have known girls like Emily. They are beautiful women. Looking at her grave I was reminded of the words of Achilles 'will anyone remember me?' Emily judging by the torrent of mementos on you're grave will not soon be forgotten. Emily I did not know you. I'm sorry I didn't. I am the worse off for not having met you. I wish I had. You didn't just touch the lives of the people around you but their souls.

If we had met I would have told you something. You were one of the great ones. The men and boys who served with you all secretly adored you. You were there Joan of Arc. They would have followed you anywhere. And did. If you had sent them on a quest they all would have gone willingly for you to the ends of the earth in search of Excalibur and in the end the truest knight would have been revealed to you. Emily you were loved. You were loved in this world girl. You ARE a jewel.

This is a book in three parts. The first part traces the post-Vietnam intellectual evolution of "counterinsurgency" (COIN) warfare thinking within the US military from several different perspectives. The second part describes the history of counterinsurgency on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq while also dealing with its politics in Washington. The final part asks some really tough questions as to what these people accomplished, what the value of the strategy is and what the future of the American military should be.

The book presents counterinsurgency strategy as something that grew out of a "social sciences" subculture at West Point in the aftermath of Vietnam. These people were academics and intellectuals. They studied non-traditional subjects and often held advanced degrees such as PhDs. At one point in the book there is a rather disturbing comment where John Nagl actually describes himself as a "social scientist" and soldier.

The first portion of the book is interesting at first but becomes rather tedious. It's interesting to know all the various people, their social networks and how they influenced change in the military. But at a certain point is a tough read and more like reference material than anything else.

The early part of the book does not challenge COIN enough. In particular, the view that COIN was the answer to victory in Vietnam is utterly foolish. The Vietnam War was not won by the Viet Cong or an insurgency. It was won by the army of North Vietnam launching a conventional invasion of the south. While the war might have been an insurgency in 1963, but 1965 it was a very conventional conflict with the Viet Cong operating in battalion sized units. The US sent the Special Forces to open jungle camps near the border at places like Lang Vei and they were overrun by heavy tanks. The views of COIN advocates on the Vietnam War are quite frankly utterly wrong. So are their views of lessons to be learned from the British in Malaya.

The book also fails to see a very obvious point. If the US has a military larger than is justified to face any possible conventional threat, that is probably an argument for a smaller US military. It should not be an argument that we should keep the same size military and find it new tasks like nation building. The idea that we have to have an army of a certain size & cost and that its size & cost provides itself the justification for doing things like Somalia or Iraq is just crazy.

The definition of COIN employed in the book by its promoters is too broad. It's used to cover both operations to prevent insurgencies and operations to fight established insurgencies. But those are in practice two very different things. The book oddly shows both being successful and both failing. The book claims that COIN was practiced by the US early on in Afghanistan with some success but that it has failed in the last few years. The opposite is true in Iraq where there was no COIN at first and then COIN was used to bring about a conclusion to the war.

The book's coverage of the war in Iraq is rather spotty and one-sided. The author accepts the Patraeus fantasy story spun to the press about his first tour in Iraq while openly insulting Tommy Franks and saying little more about events during the term of Ricardo Sanchez than to call him incompetent. The thing about after the first few months in Iraq is that all the military "superstars" seemed to go home with their combat "credibility" to write field manuals, hang out in Florida, or to do postgraduate studies. Constantly sniping after at those who ended up in Iraq in their place.

The book seems to indirectly suggest that we "won" the Iraq war when Petraeus was allowed to finally stack the promotion board in Washington and push his minions up to the top. A quote from Nagl in the book says it all: "Why haven't I been promoted. We've got idiots running this place."

The book presents a very selective picture of events in Iraq during the surge. It tends to give more credit to military COIN operations and far less credit to changes in political policy at the same time. The softening of policy toward Sunnis in particular is not presented in a comprehensive way.

The author is hostile to McCrystal in Afghanistan. As much as the book tries to make COIN look more successful than it was in Iraq, it goes out of its way to say all the things McChrystal supposedly did wrong. It's almost as if the book intended to present at one point the idea that COIN would have worked if McCrystal had only done in right. It also pushes at the crowd around McChrystal for being arrogant and insular ironically without fully seeing the arrogant/insular nature of the crowd around Petraeus. The impression is given that McChrystal was a little bit too blue collar and not enough Ivy League intellectual for the author's taste in Generals.

In the last ten or so pages of the book, the author seems to completely swing around in his opinions. He offers a rather devastating critique of COIN, COIN wars and the lasting impact of those involved. It's strange because it's so at odds with how the book builds up to that point. I completely agree with his critique to the effect that fighting these large counterinsurgency wars (Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan) is a choice the country makes and it's often the wrong choice to be making. That COIN is designed to fight wars the country should generally be avoiding in the first place. That the history of COIN wars is not necessarily all that positive a legacy. But I still find it strange that he says almost none of this until the very end of the book.

I somewhat wonder if there were changes made to the ending of the book over the last few months. That this book might have been a whole lot more positive toward its subjects originally. There is no way to really know.

My personal belief is that the sort of preventative countinsurgency strategies Petraeus used in his first tour in Iraq were good things and normal things the military should do. But his later counterinsurgency efforts convinced me once again that the tactics can't win wars, they can only create a breathing space to allow country to exit a war in a graceful manner. But what is a graceful exit really worth in terms of money and lives?

As well, the doomsday stories that were used to say that the US had no choice but to stay in Iraq have mostly been proven false now by the civil war in Syria. Syria has been able to totally self-destruct without the entire region falling into all-out war or interventions by its neighbors. Certainly the civil war in Syria is not a good thing, but it does somewhat validate a view that the US could have left an unstable Iraq much earlier without triggering doomsday.

The book is a somewhat useful reference for the rise and fall of the counterinsurgency movement within the military. It can possibly be of use in terms of understanding how a small group of intellectuals can accomplish a great deal of influence in a large organization. Its coverage of the actual wars is at best average with a tendency toward bias in any number of ways. I absolutely agree however with most of the author's conclusions at the end of the book about the usefulness and limitations of counterinsurgency warfare.

it's great book. and i wanna say
"Comparison of Soviet (1979-1989) and American battlefield experience in Afghanistan"
http://www.the store.com/dp/B00B5YFS66
is another great book in this genre.

Soviet troops are perfectly familiar with the inner workings of Afghanistan. During the Soviet occupation of the country from 1979 to 1989, they learned all the tricks and nuances of this nation. Their intelligence agents successfully recruited informants from among the most influential Afghani tribes. Their soldiers were stationed at the same positions where ISAF forces are now.
The most interesting are stories of amazing survival in seemingly hopeless situations, or of comic occurrences during the war. There were a lot of those, and they are collected in the book "Soviet Afghanistan Veterans Share Their Stories, Make Predictions. Comparison of Soviet (1979-1989) and American battlefield experience in Afghanistan" http://www.the store.com/dp/B00B5YFS66

For instance, here are a couple of stories from this book told by an intelligence agent:

Once in Kabul I met my friend L. Our ways had parted after the academy. He'd already done his two-year tour and was there as an inspector. Our trip down the memory lane lasted well past midnight. And at 0800 L. had to be on an An-12 plane leaving from the airport for Jalalabad. He missed the alarm and we left the base quite late, hoping the early-morning streets of Kabul would be empty of traffic. But we didn't make it; when we arrived at the airport, the plane had already taken off. On the way back I kept trying to cheer my friend up, but he was unhappy because he'd missed an important appointment. When we drove through the gates of the base, we were greeted with hugs and welcomes by all the free officers present. We were startled and at first couldn't figure out what was going on. And when we were told that the An-12, the one my friend had just missed, had been shot down by a missile right after takeoff, we fell into a stupor. The commander invited us into his office, where he "revived" us. Apparently the pilot neglected the first rule of taking off at Kabul: always ascend on a spiral and always stay above the airfield. He must have thought he'd make it just fine in such an early hour, but if so, he was wrong. Afterward it took a long time to pick up all the bodies in the mountains. This is how an overnight bull session between two friends saved one of them from certain death...
Recently I heard that my friend passed away at the age of 68, after a serious illness. After the collapse of the Soviet Union he stayed in Tashkent, where he'd been stationed. There was some story about some locals setting him up so he had to spend two years in prison, which was where he became ill. God bless his soul...

Over thirty stories by Soviet officers, soldiers, and military analysts are collected in the book "Soviet Afghanistan Veterans Share Their Stories, Make Predictions. Comparison of Soviet (1979-1989) and American battlefield experience in Afghanistan" published at the store.

In the past hundred years, the US military has repeatedly had to fight guerrilla wars. And each time it's forgotten its lessons. After the Huk rebellion in 1946, the US tried to win Vietnam with carpet bombing. After Vietnam, the Army tried to win Iraq with tanks. Now we're trying to win Pakistan with drones and Hellfire missiles.

THE INSURGENTS is the fascinating story of the now-famous US general who rebuilt the Army's approach to fighting insurgents in Iraq. But the Sunni militia aren't the insurgents of the title. The insurgents are General Petraeus and those US Army officers who had to fight under the radar - like insurgents -- to redevelop an effective counter-insurgency doctrine. They fought to retrain the troops, and get them out out their Humvees, within an Army that so desperately wanted to keep fighting big tank battles that they demoted and sidelined many officers who too rudely pointed out that big tank battles are history.

It's a story of uncommon bravery and wit, and really well told by Fred Kaplan, who is one of the smartest people writing about the military today over at Slate.

Whether you're a military history buff, as I am, or you just want to know what the hell happened over there in Iraq for the past ten years, this is a terrific book.

The United States exists because Americans once knew how to fight and win a guerilla war. But by Vietnam, we'd lost our nimbleness.

The Insurgents is about General Petraeus's quest to revolutionize the U.S. Army, which was still clinging to Cold War-style tactics even as it faced terrorists and insurgents who didn't play by the textbook rules of battle. Ironically, Petraeus and his fellow revolutionaries all came from West Point, specifically from its Social Sciences department. Kaplan tells in fascinating detail how this "Sosh cabal" changed U.S. policy and the course of the Iraq war.

Even as a military history buff, I found the book filled with stories and events I'd never heard before. Anyone interested in military history or U.S. foreign policy should read it.

This book is an excellent and well researched look at the evolution of counterinsurgency strategy within the U.S. military in the modern era, specifically in the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book also examines how the way America fights its wars has been, and is being, shaped. In a broader sense, it is also a book that examines how to bring change to any large institution that has grown inflexible due to entrenched bureaucracy. Highly recommended.

An outstanding review of the necessary changes that the US Military undertook during the transition from conventional WWII thinking to that of unconventional warfare against insurgents in "small wars." As J.F.C. Fuller has stated, the next war is always fought with the obsolete tactics of the previous war, as the end of the US Civil War with its trench warfare presaged the trench warfare of WWI.

This book deserves five stars because of its successful synthesis of information and readability. Fred Kaplan is a well-known political writer for Slate, and can be treated with credibility; though he assumes such a role in the field his writing is distinguished but accessible. While I've read thicker texts on similar topics, The Insurgents reads much more like a novel. Truly a gripping book.

Despite its more colloquial appeal, it's not a memoir or a biography. It's authoritative in its content and I believe it should be considered a legitimate scholarly text.

The structure of the book is also rather unique. While General Patraeus is on the cover and in the supplemental title, he is not its only focus. Patraeus was instrumental in the changes undergone in the military but he is only one of a group of indispensable reformists (hence, it's plural insurgents). The book gives some exposition on the individuals and proceeds along a somewhat linear timeline, jumping between the stories of the relevant players. This would be a good framework for an HBO series.

I think it's also important to note how valuable this collection of efforts was, and how well it's immortalized in this book. When I read this, I carried it around with me. One officer in my ROTC detachment would often give me flak about reading about a "disgraced" general, but that misses the point and does a dis-service to the invaluable lessons of a man's otherwise stellar service. Gen Patraeus made an mistake, but it doesn't invalidate the efforts he made in defense of our country and those reforms to our military which will be evident for a generation.

My one regret about this book is that I gave it to a departing lieutenant - recognizing the value it could have to a young officer - and can no longer reference it in my current schoolwork. I'll probably buy it again.

How you take one of the most compelling subjects of the day -- the transformation of the military -- and turn it into a sequence of pages that you can't get to the bottom of is beyond me. It is a book that is about being about something interesting. Reminds me of those lame newspaper stories of a scientific breakthrough where you learn who did it, who financed it, who the discoverer's gurus were, with nothing about the discovery beyond somebody's conclusion that it would surely produce mighty changes. Stay at home.

Why did he let his dick think for him?
I worked for a couple of dozen generals and except for a couple they were average egomaniacs
As for Fred Kaplan, when you start believing your own propaganda watch out.
As for the book itself, just remember Mein Kampf was a bestseller.

Someone who is really interested in the army may enjoy this book. Since I'm not, I realized that sometimes I was reading words but not really paying attention to what I was reading. I didn't finish it.

The story of Gen David Petraeus reads like a novel. Congrats to Fred Kaplan for giving us a great read, and an interesting study in the politics of leadership in the US military. Proof yet again that a Type A personality will overcome common sense everytime. But why is it 25% cheaper on iTunes.

After reading a sample only, I predict this book will have a short life - except among military wonks. Kaplan's view of Petraeus and his exploits is seemingly not totally objective, but it is not as fawning as many people who have written about him (e.g., Tom Ricks and more recently media whom Petraeus's expensive PR counsel have pitched to salvage his image).

A couple of military friends have said they have no interest in Petraeus after word of his influence peddling while he was a commander in Afghanistan, as well as his lavish living in Tampa and Afghanistan, compliments of U.S. taxpayers. Others who are career military say they can separate the officer from his unsavory personal life but were never duly impressed with his record as a war commander. Having never been in the military but having observed and read about Petraeus for a few years, I think he is at best a mediocre war commander. He seemed, however, to be a tireless self-promoter of an image he crafted for himself.

Democrat bias through the whole book! Gave it a try but not for me, I am a patriot. This guy has been doing the publicity rounds and WOW! He sure does love Obama yet he hates Bush! This stuff passes as journalism now?