COVER

Marines with 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, conduct a Civil Affairs Group patrol

with Afghan National Army soldiers and members of U.S. Agency for International

Development in Nawa District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan July 19, 2009. Marines

with 1/5, Regimental Combat Team 3 are engaged in counterinsurgency operations in

partnership with the Afghan national security forces to improve security and stability in

southern Afghanistan. Photo by SSgt. William Greeson.
Counterinsurgency Leadership

in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

Edited by

Nicholas J. Schlosser and James M. Caiella

Marine Corps University Press

Quantico, Virginia
Marine Corps University Press

3078 Upshur Avenue

Quantico, VA 22134

1st Printing, 2011

PCN 10600002400
Contents

Foreword ............................................................................................ v

Major General Robert B. Neller, USMC

Introduction: Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq,

and Beyond ........................................................................................ 1

Nicholas J. Schlosser

Part I: Counterinsurgency Leadership

Chapter 1

Counterinsurgency Leadership: ce Key to Afghanistan

and Iraq.............................................................................................. 9

Mark Moyar

Chapter 2

Supreme Command in Irregular Warfare ........................................ 17

Eliot A. Cohen

Part II: Brigade and Regimental Command

Chapter 3

ce Art of Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency...................... 29

H. R. McMaster

Chapter 4

Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency Operations: Lessons from

the Iraq War..................................................................................... 37

Peter R. Mansoor

Chapter 5

Regimental Command in Counterinsurgency ................................. 51

W. Blake Crowe

Part III: Battalion Command

Chapter 6

ce Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency:

A Discussion.................................................................................... 57

Francis J. “Bing” West

David J. Furness

William M. Jurney

Julian Dale Alford

iii
iv

Part IV: Officer Development in the U.S. Military

Chapter 7

Officer Development for Counterinsurgency................................... 77

Nathaniel C. Fick

Chapter 8

ce “Major” Challenge of Junior Officer Leadership Development

and Talent Management .................................................................. 85

Paula D. Broadwell

Chapter 9

Generalship and Counterinsurgency.............................................. 103

Qomas E. Ricks

Part V: Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan

Chapter 10

Winning in Afghanistan................................................................ 111

David W. Barno and John K. Wood

Chapter 11

Advising Afghan Military Forces................................................... 123

Jeffery M. Haynes

Part VI: The 2009 Afghan Presidential Election

Chapter 12

ce Afghan Election and the Future of Afghanistan’s Leadership:

A Discussion .................................................................................. 133

Robert D. Kaplan

Clare Lockhart

Amin Tarzi

Jeffrey Gedmin

Part VII: General Officer Leadership in Counterinsurgency

Chapter 13

A Conversation with General David H. Petraeus .......................... 149

Contributors................................................................................... 181

Appendix: Acronyms and Abbreviations............................. 193

Index................................................................................................. 197

Contents
Foreword

by Major General Robert B. Neller, USMC

cis volume collects the works presented at the 2009 symposium

“Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond.” cis

one-day colloquium was cohosted by the Marine Corps University and the

Marine Corps University Foundation and held at the National Press Club

in Washington, DC.

Our recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown once again

the difference that excellent leadership can make in irregular warfare.crust

unexpectedly into counterinsurgency situations in 2002 and 2003, American

commanders had to operate under difficult and constantly changing

conditions. Some adapted quickly; others adjusted over a longer period of

time with the help of experience and education. Selecting the right

commanders became more important than ever to unit effectiveness. We

have come a long way in recent years, but opportunities for further

improvement in leadership development and command selection remain.

ce leaders of our Afghan and Iraqi allies have also played vital roles in

combating the insurgents. Indigenous and host-nation forces enjoy natural

advantages in dealing with the population, and provide badly needed

manpower in areas where foreign troops are too few and cannot remain

indefinitely. With a thorough understanding of our allies and local political

and social conditions, we can help newborn nations develop the leadership

required for long-term success.

ce need for leadership goes beyond today’s conflicts and, indeed, lies

at the heart of current debates over the future of our national security

organizations and strategy. Although most of the public discourse thus far

has concentrated on questions of equipment and future threats, leadership

will also be a crucial variable. As national security professionals, we must

strive to ensure that the nation fields the leaders best suited to tackling the

challenges of the twenty-first century.

Robert B. Neller

Major General, U.S. Marine Corps

President, Marine Corps University

v

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq,

and Beyond

by Nicholas J. Schlosser

In a 2009 speech, General David H. Petraeus related how, during his

time as the commander of Multi National Force–Iraq, he encountered a

sign on a company commander’s door that read, “In the absence of orders

or guidance, figure out what they should have been and execute vigorously.”1

cis quotation synthesizes two fundamental tenets of effective leadership in

a counterinsurgency. First, there is the imperative for commanders to impart

a clear intent and vision to their subordinates that will enable them to “figure

out” the best and most effective means for battling the insurgency. Second,

there is a need for subordinate commanders to innovate, adapt, and

implement effective counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics on their own initiative.

1

1 Gen David H. Petraeus, USA, “Commander's remarks, Center for a New American Security, June

11, 2009,” http://www.centcom.mil/from-the-commander/commanders-remarks-center-for-a-newamerican-security-june-11-2009, (accessed July 15, 2010).

Introduction
Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

ce following selections illustrate how these two factors have formed

the foundation for effective COIN leadership. ce wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan have brought a renewed interest in COIN warfare. In both of

these conflicts, U.S. forces have found themselves in a constantly changing

battlefield environment, frequently with little in terms of specific guidance

regarding tactics and strategy. As a result, the leadership abilities of

individual Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen—ranging from the

commanders of fire teams and squads to the commanders of Marine

expeditionary forces and Army corps—often became a decisive factor in the

success or failure of a particular operation.

cis volume—based on the proceedings of Marine Corps University’s

“Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond”symposium

held in Washington, DC, in September 2009—contains the thoughts,

arguments, experiences, and observations of twenty scholars, soldiers, Marines,

and policy makers.cis collection presents an exploration of COIN leadership

in all of its facets and includes chapters on the roles that civilian leadership,

military leadership, civil-military cooperation, advisory operations, and alliance

relations play in confronting and defeating insurgencies.

Among the variety of perspectives, some salient themes and arguments

underpin the entries in this volume and provide a number of basic assertions

regarding COIN leadership. First, there are the unique qualities of effective

COIN leaders.ce second theme is the role civil-military relationships and

alliances play in counterinsurgencies. ce third is the importance of

commanders to the success of COIN operations.

ce first is the assertion that COIN leadership requires a unique set of

skills that set it apart from leadership in irregular warfare. As Nathaniel C.

Fick points out in his chapter, the traits needed for effective COIN

leadership are nearly identical to the fourteen Marine Corps leadership

traits.2 As Mark Moyar and Eliot A. Cohen note, however, COIN

leadership requires a specific set of characteristics and traits distinct from

other forms of combat leadership. Moyar’s chapter explores the impact

effective and ineffective civilian and military leaders can have upon a

successful counterinsurgency operation.3 In the course of his piece, Moyar

2

2 Nathaniel C. Fick, chapter 7, “Officer Development for Counterinsurgency.”

3 Mark Moyar, chapter 1, “Counterinsurgency Leadership: ce Key to Afghanistan and Iraq.”
further makes the argument that while commanders skilled at COIN

operations also have the traits and skills necessary for conducting regular

warfare operations, the opposite is not necessarily true.

Cohen’s chapter makes similar contentions regarding the uniqueness of

COIN leadership.4 He focuses on the challenges facing civil authorities in

both the United States and host nations, and outlines a range of unique

challenges facing commanders-in-chief during counterinsurgencies that

include finding generals with the specific characteristics best suited for this

type of warfare, avoiding a heavy reliance on metrics such as elections and

territory gained to measure success, integrating civil and military command

at the local level, and practicing strategic patience. Cohen also reminds readers

of another challenge facing COIN leaders: the need for cooperation between

the outside power and the host nation. As he points out, while the United

States may perceive counterinsurgencies as small, limited wars, they are total

wars for the host nation, upon which the country’s very survival hangs.

cis asymmetrical dynamic grants considerable bargaining power to the

host nation’s leaders. Consequently, the importance of alliance relationships

and need for close cooperation between diplomats, advisors, and military

commanders is a second theme that runs through this volume. ce panel

discussion among Robert D. Kaplan, Clare Lockhart, Amin Tarzi, and

Jeffrey Gedmin is a timely reminder that success or failure in defeating an

insurgency hinges on whether the host nation’s government enjoys

legitimacy in the eyes of its people.5 ce panelists, speaking not long after

the controversial and disputed 2009 Afghan elections, provide insight and

perspective on the dynamics of the Afghan political system. In the course

of their discussion, the participants refute the general impression that

Afghanistan has been a perennially lawless, chaotic state. As Tarzi and

Kaplan observe, the state once had a moderately stable government that was

able to ensure security within its borders. Placing the current situation in

Afghanistan in perspective, the discussants consider the means needed to

restore security and stability to the troubled state.

Expanding on the importance of building alliance relationships in

counterinsurgencies is General Petraeus’s open discussion with the symposium’s

3

Introduction

4 Eliot A. Cohen, chapter 2, “Supreme Command in Irregular Warfare.”

5 Robert D. Kaplan, Clare Lockhart, Amin Tarzi, and Jeffrey Gedmin, chapter 12, “ce Afghan

Election and the Future of Afghanistan’s Leadership: A Discussion.”
participants. As he points out in Chapter 13, the U.S. forces in Afghanistan are

part of a larger, international coalition.6 Furthermore, U.S. Forces Central

Command can only pursue its missions with the help and support of

governments in its area of responsibility, a region that stretches from the Red Sea

to central Asia. croughout his discussion, Petraeus stresses that success in

Afghanistan is only possible if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

can build strong partnerships with both the host nation as well as bordering

states such as Pakistan. As he notes about Pakistan, “Countering terrorism

requires more than counterterrorist forces, it requires a whole-of-governments

counterinsurgency mindset. It does not mean that those forces have to be yours.

And I think Pakistan is a great example of that. cere, the Pakistanis are doing

the fighting for which we are providing substantial assistance.”7

ce chapters by Colonel Jeffery M. Haynes and retired Lieutenant General

David W. Barno provide further insight into the character of the conflict in

Afghanistan. Chapter 10 by Barno and retired Colonel John K. Wood presents

an overview of the current situation in Afghanistan and lays out the challenges

facing NATO as it strives to build a stable, legitimate Afghan state.8ce authors

propose a range of strategies, including rebuilding civil-military relationships

and reframing the public narrative. Meanwhile, Haynes’s chapter describes the

techniques and procedures used to build and advise Afghanistan’s military force,

drawing on his own experience as an adviser to the Afghan National Army’s

201st Corps.9

ce third and final theme running through this work is the critical importance

commanders in the field have in shaping the character of overall COIN strategy.ce

chapters by Brigadier General H. R. McMaster, Brigadier General W. Blake Crowe,

and retired Colonel Peter R. Mansoor provide insight and recommendations into

how regimental and brigade commanders can best utilize the combat and logistical

resources of their formations to conduct effective COIN operations. 10 A brigade’s

4

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

6 Chapter 13, “A Conversation with General David H. Petraeus.”

7 Ibid.

8 LtGen David W. Barno, USA (Ret), and Col John K. Wood, USA (Ret), chapter 10, “Winning in

Afghanistan.”

9 Col Jeffery M. Haynes, USMC, chapter 11, “Advising Afghan Military Forces.”

10 BGen H. R. McMaster, USA, chapter 3, “ce Art of Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency,”;

Col Peter R. Mansoor, USA (Ret), chapter 4, “Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency Operations:

Lessons from the Iraq War,”; BGen W. Blake Crowe, USMC, chapter 5, “Regimental Command in

Counterinsurgency.”
and regiment’s tasks include defeating insurgent fighters in the field, establishing

security, and laying the foundations for stability. As Crowe’s chapter illustrates, this

sometimes forces regiments to provide local governance as well as administration.

As he notes in referring to his service as a regimental commander in western Iraq,

“In 2006, we were the surrogate government. We did not have mayors at the time.

ce provincial governor was in Ramadi and he stayed there.”11

As the selection by McMaster demonstrates, however, the most important

formations in counterinsurgencies are usually smaller than regiments and

brigades. As he reminds readers,“I think it’s important for us to understand that

success in these wars really depends on effective operations at much lower levels,

such as at the platoon, company, and battalion levels.”12 Chapter 6 highlights the

importance of battalion level forces in COIN operations. In this panel

discussion, Francis J. “Bing” West, Colonel David J. Furness, Colonel William

M. Jurney, and Colonel Julian Dale Alford describe how battalion commanders

have prepared and trained their companies to best battle insurgent forces and

defend and win over the local populace.13 Drawing on their own experiences in

Iraq and Afghanistan, Furness, Jurney, and Alford all highlight how initiative,

adaptability, and creativity are essential factors for successful COIN leaders.cey

also remind readers how the scattered, unpredictable, and clandestine nature of

insurgent strategies forces all officers, whether they are corps commanders or

platoon commanders, to understand the impact their actions can have upon the

entire campaign. Most important, they highlight the need for inventiveness and

resourcefulness in the field.

How to produce competent and skilled officers for COIN operations is

the subject of the chapters by comas E. Ricks, Nathaniel Fick, and Paula

D. Broadwell. As Ricks notes in Chapter 9, “I think there’s no

accident...that the first effective, sustained COIN campaigns in Iraq took

place very far from Baghdad.”14 Paula Broadwell reinforces and expands on

this assertion when she reminds readers that “COIN and full spectrum

operations require that we invest great authority, responsibility, and resources

5

Introduction

11 Crowe, “Regimental Command in Counterinsurgency.”

12 McMaster, “Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency.”

13 Hon. Francis J. “Bing” West; Col David J. Furness, USMC; Col William M. Jurney, USMC; and

Col Julian Dale Alford, USMC, chapter 6, “ce Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency:

A Discussion.”

14 comas E. Ricks, chapter 9, “Generalship and Counterinsurgency.”
at the lowest operational ranks.”15 Both these chapters, as well as the

contribution by Fick, outline the problems and challenges facing the U.S.

military as it builds an adaptive, versatile, and competent officer corps capable

of fighting future conflicts, many, if not most, of which will be small wars akin

to those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ricks argues that the reluctance to use relief

as a tool of command has severely weakened the general officer corps of the

U.S. Army. Meanwhile, Broadwell and Fick illustrate the process of developing

effective junior officers for the future, with Broadwell looking at institutional

developments and challenges and Fick providing a personal account of his

service as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps.

In sum, this volume gives readers a diverse collection of perspectives,

insights, and recommendations for COIN and war fighting in the 21st century.

ce breadth of the topics discussed is a testament to how crucial effective

governance, cultural understanding, civil affairs, and military operations are to

COIN. Furthermore, the collection demonstrates how competent leaders are

necessary to bring these often disparate elements together into a cohesive

whole and a multifaceted campaign that can effectively defeat insurgencies on

the military, political, cultural, and economic battlefields. With international

terrorism and global insurgency remaining a persistent threat, an exploration

of this subject remains timely, relevant, and necessary.

* * *

Dr. Mark Moyar and Major Andrew D. Hamilton organized the

conference on which this book is based and initiated the book concept. At

Marine Corps University Press, Senior Editor Kenneth H. Williams and

editors Shawn H. Vreeland and Wanda J. Renfrow provided editorial

guidance and helped to adapt the papers and presentations for publication.

Marine Corps History Division intern Max von Bargen also provided

editorial support. ce book was designed by Vincent J. Martinez.

Dr. Nicholas J. Schlosser

Marine Corps History Division

6

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

15 Paula D. Broadwell, chapter 8, “ce ‘Major’ Challenge of Junior Officer Leadership Development

and Talent Management.”


Counterinsurgency Leadership: Qe Key to

Afghanistan and Iraq

by Mark Moyar

Counterinsurgency (COIN) leadership is an incredibly timely subject,

especially since our government’s top leaders are now considering a new

strategy for Afghanistan that has everything to do with COIN leadership.

It is also a timeless subject. Commanders who succeeded at COIN in the

campaigns of Alexander the Great or the American Civil War were similar

in most respects to the commanders who have succeeded in Afghanistan

and Iraq during our present century. In my view, leadership is and always has

been the most important factor in COIN, for it is central to the most

important activities of COIN—security and governance.

ce security side—which consists primarily of securing the population

and attacking the insurgents—demands leaders at the local level have the

attributes to obtain intelligence from scared civilians, to sustain morale when

troops die, and to hunt the enemy relentlessly through cities or jungles.

9

Chapter 1
Above all, the quality of governance hinges on the integrity and competence

of leaders. Poor leadership is the root cause of all the Afghan government’s

dire problems cited in Army General Stanley A. McChrystal’s new report—

from the failure to protect the people to corruption to the absence of justice.

Not all of the experts gathered here today would agree that leadership

quality stands at the pinnacle of COIN. ce adherents of the “hearts and

minds”school, for example, assign higher priority to remediating social and

economic grievances. But I don’t believe that any will contend that

leadership is unimportant. Our agreement on the importance of command

gives us all an interest in working to improve leadership quality, which is our

principal objective today.

I also believe that how we prioritize leadership quality will greatly affect

our ability to change it. If it doesn’t stand near the top of the priority list, it

won’t receive adequate resources or command attention. Too often

counterinsurgents have concentrated so intently on which methods should

be used that they neglect the more important question of who should use

those methods. Many counterinsurgencies have, in fact, been run aground

by relegating leadership to a secondary concern.ce beginnings of the wars

in Afghanistan and Iraq are two unhappy examples. In Iraq, after the fall of

Saddam Hussein, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul

Bremer, dismantled the Iraqi regime and barred its leaders from

governmental service in the belief that the old elites could be easily replaced

by new ones, and he could therefore focus his attention on methods and

resources. Bremer gave government leadership positions to Iraqi exiles

whose good manners and Western educations gave them a veneer of skill

that masked their real dearth of experience and talent.

When the United States pressed the baton into the hand of Iyad

Allawi’s interim Iraqi government in June 2004, it granted the Iraqis full

authority over leadership appointments. Multi National Force–Iraq (MNFI) commanding General George W. Casey Jr. and others in the U.S. military

were soon citing this decision as a colossal error, and with good reason.

Personal, political, and sectarian connections took precedence over merit in

Iraqi personnel decisions. When Iraqi governmental security forces and

administrators were brought in to hold areas after Americans forces had

cleared them, they often could not prevent the insurgents from returning,

primarily because their officers were not experienced or committed enough

to organize effective resistance to enemy attacks.

10

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
In Afghanistan, the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty

Organization (NATO) allies at first entrusted the organs of government to

regional warlords who were, almost to a man, inclined toward corruption

and human rights violations. From the early stages of the war, the warlords

dominated the leadership of the police, the most troublesome part of the

Afghan government. President Hamid Karzai exacerbated matters by

handing commands in the security forces to friends, relatives, and political

supporters of unsavory character. With regrettable regularity, poorly led

police have indulged in extortion, kidnapping, and all the other abuses listed

in General McChrystal’s report, which together have turned the Pashtun

belt into fertile soil for insurgent recruiters. And the police’s appetite for

abusing the populace has too infrequently been accompanied by an appetite

for abusing the insurgents.

ce good news is that most counterinsurgencies have several levers

available that can sharply improve the quality of their leaders. History shows

that the most effective levers are to be found in one of four broad categories:

leader development, command selection, co-option of elites, and delegation

of authority.

cere are a few examples from recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan

that provide evidence of the potential for improvement. ce remarkable

Sunni Awakening from 2005 to 2007 reversed the tide of war in Iraq’s Sunni

areas primarily by co-opting talented and experienced Sunni elites. It was

made possible by an American policy shift that authorized tribal

engagement, but it also required the exertions of excellent American field

commanders who led the unrelenting military operations, oversaw the basic

governance, and conducted the protracted tea-table negotiations required to

convince fence-sitting sheikhs to move their tribes to the American side.

ce 2007 surge owed much of its success to improvements in Iraqi

command selection and to co-option of additional Iraqi elites. Over the

course of the year, with the Americans cajoling and at times threatening to

withdraw aid, the Iraqi government relieved army commanders as high as

division level, along with seven of the nine National Police brigade

commanders and more than 2,000 Iraqi Interior Ministry personnel. As a

consequence, the Iraqi security forces started killing insurgents and stopped

filling the streets and sewers with the bodies of civilians who belonged to the

wrong Muslim denomination. In addition, General David H. Petraeus,

11

Counterinsurgency Leadership: Qe Key to Afghanistan and Iraq
General Casey’s successor as the commander of MNF-I, increased the

overall quality of the leadership committed to population security by

assigning more American forces to that mission. More elites came over to

the government’s side because of counterinsurgent military success and

continuing tribal engagement.

In Afghanistan, serious efforts in leader development and command

selection have originated with a few cabinet officials. Defense Minister Abdul

Rahim Wardak has achieved major progress in both areas over the past five

years, which has done much to make the Afghan National Army the most

effective and impartial of Afghanistan’s institutions. ce Afghan Interior

Ministry did not have a high-caliber leader at the helm until the appointment

of Mohammad Hanif Atmar in fall 2008. Since taking office, Atmar has

replaced corrupt police chiefs with better men and invigorated the ministry,

with considerable help from the United States, which wisely ramped up

support to the ministry in 2008. He is, nevertheless, limited in what he can

accomplish in the short-term by the shortage of experienced Afghan police

officers and the ongoing influence of the warlords. Whether Afghanistan’s

president retains the senior leadership in the defense and interior ministries

after the election is resolved, or replaces them for political or personal reasons,

it could reshape the future of Afghanistan’s COIN leadership.

ce rates of Afghan force expansion could also fundamentally alter

the leadership dynamics. Rapid doubling or tripling of the host-nation

security forces, which many in Washington and some in Kabul now

recommend, has failed in countless other counterinsurgencies for the

same basic reason—insufficient leadership. New forces can be created in

six months by putting men in uniform and administering rudimentary

training, but forging the battalion commanders to lead them takes ten or

twenty years. In the absence of seasoned leaders, troops crack under fire.

cey will steal people’s chickens, goats, or whatever other delectable farm

animals they can lay their fingers on. Many will desert and some will go

over to the enemy, taking their weapons with them, which happened

repeatedly in Afghanistan during the 1980s when the Soviets fielded illled Afghan COIN forces.

If top U.S. leaders decide on a dramatic expansion of the Afghan

security forces in the next few years, certain measures can be taken to prevent

those disastrous consequences, albeit at significant cost. In my estimation,

12

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
assuring quality will require either the very large step of placing Afghan

forces under the command of the NATO officers who are leading their

partner units, or else the deployment of many additional NATO personnel

as advisers or members of partner units. In other words, without that very

large step, we cannot use expansion of the Afghan security forces as a

substitute for foreign troop increases. Afghan and NATO forces, and

particularly American forces, will have to increase in number together. I also

think it is worthwhile to debate whether advising or partnering is more

helpful to the Afghan security forces.

While host-nation leadership has been and remains the most important

problem in both Iraq and Afghanistan, American COIN leadership has had

its imperfections as well. American commanders do not regularly commit

basic errors that have been common among Iraqi and Afghan officers, such

as doing nothing all day, fleeing in panic at the first glimpse of a hostile

weapon, or demanding bribes from civilians at roadside checkpoints.

Nevertheless, some have been much more effective as leaders than others

because of differences in key attributes.

ce more creative and flexible commanders have improvised effectively

and devised new methods adapted to local conditions, while others have

not. Some have shown greater initiative than others in military operations

or intelligence collection or civil affairs. Success in building relationships

with key local power players has varied widely from one place to another

according to the social skills and competence of the American commander

on the scene.

ce ranges of variation in these attributes have been wider in the

Army than in the Marine Corps, and wider still in the National Guard

and Reserves. From the early experiences in Iraq, senior Army generals

recognized an insufficiency in creativity and flexibility among certain

officers and took effective remedial measures, from training and education

to promotion and command selection. A number of Army generals also

concluded that risk-aversion within the service was impeding initiative,

and they sought to promote risk-taking, although those reform efforts

appear to have been less fruitful thus far. When I surveyed Marine and

U.S. Army veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan on COIN topics last year, I

found that just 28 percent of Army respondents believed that their service

encouraged risk-taking by company and battalion commanders. By

13

Counterinsurgency Leadership: Qe Key to Afghanistan and Iraq
contrast, 58 percent of Marine respondents said as much of their service,

which provides a good indicator of the room for improvement that

remains within the Army.

cat survey’s results also indicated that both the Marine Corps and the

Army have been too tolerant of bad leadership in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fifty-nine percent of the soldiers and 49 percent of the Marines said that

American commanders ought to be relieved for poor performance more

often. According to the respondents, onerous procedures for relieving

commanders have discouraged firings. So have personal sympathy and

concern about creating a harmful command climate. It is true that too many

firings of commanders is likely to stifle initiative, especially if done carelessly,

but I still think we should more often adopt the attitude of Ramon del

Fierro Magsaysay, whose large-scale firings in the Philippines during the

early 1950s facilitated the defeat of the Huk Rebellion. When a committee

of generals complained to Magsaysay that all the personnel changes were

demoralizing the army, he replied, “I don’t care. If they are bad I will

demoralize them some more.”

Influential elements inside today’s U.S. military worry that focusing

heavily on COIN preparedness will leave the United States ill-prepared for

conventional warfare.cis argument has considerable merit with respect to

organization and weapons systems, but I don’t believe that it holds true with

respect to leadership. Good COIN leaders also tend to be good conventional

leaders. Good conventional leaders, on the other hand, have often failed in

COIN, because they don’t have the extra attributes required of COIN

commanders.

cis point is most evident in generations of military officers with years

of experience in both COIN and conventional warfare, of which the prime

American example is the generation that commanded during the Civil War

and Reconstruction. Philip H. Sheridan, for instance, emerged from the

Civil War’s conventional battles as one of the Union’s greatest generals, yet

became one of the Union’s biggest failures in the COIN operations of

Reconstruction because he lacked critical attributes of COIN leadership.

As the Union’s top commander in Texas during Reconstruction, Sheridan

did not show the flexibility or ingenuity in administering thorny

Reconstruction policies that more successful commanders displayed. He

avoided cultivating Texan elites and allowed Federal troops to brutalize the

14

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
general population in revenge for insurgent depredations because of his poor

judgment and contempt for the population, which are best illustrated in his

remark to a newspaperman that “if I owned Hell and Texas, I would rent out

Texas and live in Hell!”

More than anything else, upcoming decisions on COIN leadership will

determine our nation’s future COIN capabilities, and hence our ability to

protect the nation from the threats posed by insurgents in Afghanistan and

other troubled countries. It is our hope that the following chapters will, in

some measure, influence the quality of those decisions for the better.

15

Counterinsurgency Leadership: Qe Key to Afghanistan and Iraq

Supreme Command in Irregular Warfare

by Eliot A. Cohen

What follows reflects a combination of scholarly interest in the problem

of supreme command and irregular warfare, and some experience as a

practitioner. In the first case, having written a book that dealt with supreme

command—defined as the civil-military relationship at the very top of the

political pyramid—in conventional war, I would like to explore it with regard

to unconventional conflict. As for the latter, for two years, from 2007

through the beginning of 2009, I served as counselor of the Department of

State, serving as the lead liaison with the deputy national security adviser for

Afghanistan and Iraq, traveling extensively to both places, advising Secretary

of State Condoleezza Rice with regard to counterinsurgency (COIN), and

often representing the department in relevant interagency meetings.

cis paper, moreover, focuses on the problem of supreme command in

the United States. Associated allies, such as Canada in Afghanistan, face

interesting but different challenges. Of course for the host or client country—

17

Chapter 2

© 2011 by Eliot A. Cohen. All rights reserved.
Afghanistan or Iraq in the current American case—these are total wars, and

in some respects their experience of supreme command will more resemble a

conventional conflict because the stakes for which they fight are so great.

Irregular warfare and supreme command in it differ in three important

respects from conventional conflict. cis is so because, in the first instance,

success or failure in irregular warfare has a much more profoundly political

character than victory or defeat in conventional war. If you succeed in an

irregular war, expect no victory parade, merely a switch to policing,

reconciliation, and murky political deals. Outcomes in irregular warfare are

blurry; these wars end not with a bang, but with a haggle.

Second, COIN is very much a valley-by-valley war, as a colonel hosting

me in Afghanistan once remarked as we flew over his area of responsibility.

ce macro picture on which statesmen and military commanders rely in

conventional war does not really exist in irregular wars. cere are no lines

moving on a map, no D-Day, no decisive battle. Success in one area may

coexist with failure in another, and uncertainty in most.

And third, these are long wars. Assertions that insurgencies last on

average ten years are too precise to be convincing, but irregular wars do

indeed, by and large, last a long time.cey last a lot longer than the wars that

generals and politicians alike have studied in university or war colleges.

Six peculiar characteristics of supreme command and COIN come to

mind.

First, in irregular warfare, attention at the top is intermittent. For the

president and the principals—the secretary of state, secretary of defense,

and others of that rank—but even for the larger bureaucracy, irregular

warfare is something to which they will devote serious attention, but it does

not constitute the first claim on their attention and effort, or does so only

sporadically. cese leaders face many other claims on their attention and

time, and no less important (particularly in the case of the secretary of

defense) they must consider the long-term institutional health of their

department, much more than they would in the middle of an all out

conventional conflict. cis divided attention and conflicting interest will

breed all kinds of tensions with the theater commander and even the onthe-ground commander.

ce second peculiar challenge is the problem of measuring progress. In

a big conventional war, you can identify the frontline. You probably have

18

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
some sense of whether your side is winning or losing—have we taken

Guadalcanal or haven’t we taken Guadalcanal? Irregular warfare yields no

such clarity. ce authorities at the top grasp for ways of knowing merely

where the trends point, let alone whether they have reached anything like

definitive success. In such circumstances, militaries turn to all kinds of

metrics, most of them spurious, to measure their success. In a famous essay

Bernard Fall, the great Franco-American student of the Vietnam War,

described the gap between the French military’s measure of success—the

areas it controlled in North Vietnam by daylight, and what he took to be the

real measure, where the French government could collect taxes. In his view,

which proved considerably more accurate than that of the French

government, the Vietminh were winning.

As a practical matter, Washington, DC, tends to measure success with

three misleading kinds of metrics.ce bureaucracy turns first to what it calls

kinetic events and other kinetic kinds of things—people getting killed,

numbers of attacks, and the dramatic quality of those attacks. ce

intelligence community in particular sometimes forgets that its database

exists to support analysis, not supplant it, and violent activity in and of itself

does not mean anything more than that a war is going on. A peaceful district

may lie completely in the grip of the insurgents, whereas a violent couple of

weeks may precede the establishment of government rule in another area—

and yet, a kinetically oriented database will record the one as a COIN

success, the other as a failure.

Leaders pay a great deal of attention as well to dramatic public events—

elections in particular.cis was particularly true in the first years in Iraq and

Afghanistan, although now some of the charm has worn off. But elections,

in particular, may mean less to the local population than provision of basic

services, and security above all. Similarly, vote-rigging, influence peddling,

and similar political dark arts may not mean a failed COIN, but rather the

existence of a political order akin to Chicago in the early twentieth

century—corrupt, ugly, and modestly effective.

Finally, the bureaucracy often looks at—and reports up the chain—

inputs or measures of effort (dollars spent, civil servants present, projects

started), rather than outputs, or what has happened on the ground. It is easy

to measure the former, difficult to measure the latter, but do those dollars do

any good if they merely divert local doctors and engineers from useful work

19

Supreme Command in Irregular Warfare
into higher paying jobs as interpreters, if the aid workers cannot move

outside their compound for lack of security, or if the brand new water pump

fails in six months because no one has provided for the spare parts and

trained technicians to maintain it?

cese kinds of metrics appeal to congressmen, political appointees,

soldiers, and diplomats alike, and mislead them profoundly. Although some

metrics have their uses, there is no definitive set or invariably correct

measure. Leaders may simply stumble on them, or use them as crude

indications, not precise indicators of what is going on. My own sense that

Afghanistan’s trends were adverse came from looking at the mobility maps

produced by the United Nations (UN) security office in Afghanistan: each

year the green areas shrank, the yellow and red (caution and extreme danger,

respectively) grew. ce trend was unmistakable, even if the particular

judgments were questionable. Moreover, as so often in this kind of conflict,

the perception mattered as much as the reality: if the maps said, “Don’t go

here,” most aid workers would not go—and that had real consequences.

Nor is it the case that the people in the field, those who are closest to

the problem have the best assessments. In this kind of war, intelligence

assessments (and this goes for input measures as well) become grades, the

grades that people award themselves. From an American point of view, these

are wars of a year at a time, and when individuals and units rotate in and out

of a war zone they have a tremendous desire to report progress

commensurate with their efforts and sacrifices during their tenure.

During my time at the State Department, I repeatedly visited a number

of locations in Afghanistan and Iraq. When I visited a unit at the beginning

of its rotation, its leaders would invariably report that the situation was much

worse than they had been led to believe before they deployed. ce mood

was one of grim determination against daunting odds.“It’s much worse than

we thought,” the staffs would often say. Six months later, however, they

would report cautious optimism: “It’s hard going and I won’t overpromise,

but we think we may have turned the corner here.”Visit the same unit at the

end of the rotation, and the line was, “We have achieved irreversible

momentum.” And then the next unit would fall in on the first, and report,

once again, grim determination against daunting odds. ce issue is not

simply one of a learning curve, although that exists, too: it reflects, rather, the

can-do spirit running counter to prudent realism.

20

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
Reports from the field in such wars get digested and condensed for

senior leaders, reducing complex local situations into simple summaries, and

becoming even further compressed into short, compelling, and often wildly

misleading thumbnail metrics.

ce worst example of this that I encountered in government was

generated not by the civilians, but by military intelligence and amplified by

career bureaucrats in the State Department. It held that 75 percent of the

violence in Afghanistan occurred in 10 percent of the districts.ce unstated

implication, of course, was that the violence in Afghanistan was localized

and contained. cis statistic appeared often in briefings (including at the

very top of the U.S. government), as well as in public testimony. I spent a

good two years fighting it, because, after only modest digging, it became

apparent how utterly incorrect it was.

ce problem began with the utterly false implication that we actually

knew what was going on in all the districts of Afghanistan (some 398 of

them). We did not, for the simple reason that neither our North Atlantic

Treaty Organization (NATO) allies nor the United States had a presence,

let alone a substantial presence, in each of those districts. ce violence

measured most effectively in the so-called SIGACTS (significant acts)

database measured violence directed against Americans or violence that

Americans initiated against the enemy. Quite apart from some bizarre

counting rules (unexploded roadside bombs counted as violent acts), this

did not measure the violence directed at Afghans nearly as well, which of

course was what counted. And even there, quantitative measures of violence

did not account for its political and psychological character. A dozen

firefights between American forces and Taliban infiltrators in the mountains

meant one thing—the grisly, public execution of an uncooperative tribal

elder in front of a terrified village meant something very different, and a lot

more from the locals’ point of view. Augment those with some nonviolent

night letters promising the same for other collaborators with the Americans,

and the violence statistics become completely meaningless. But this is what

senior leadership in Washington heard, and will often hear.

A third challenge of supreme command in irregular warfare consists

of picking the right generals, and clearly this kind of war requires a very

particular kind of commander. George S. Patton Jr. probably would not do

well waging a COIN. Quite clearly a David H. Petraeus, a Stanley A.

21

Supreme Command in Irregular Warfare
McChrystal, or a James N. Mattis most definitely do. Until they learn the

hard way, however, civilians tend to assume that generals are

interchangeable commodities, and the military’s own promotion systems

and norms—particularly those that prescribe a narrow path to high

command—reinforce that mistaken impression.

Commanders in these kinds of conflicts require peculiar aptitudes,

particularly cultural and political sensitivity, and perhaps less of the largescale engineering project kind of aptitudes characteristic of large-scale war.

Robert M. Gates, a very effective secretary of defense, set a remarkable

precedent with his difficult decision to relieve General David D. McKiernan

and replace him with General Stanley A. McChrystal. McKiernan, an able

conventional commander, had not failed spectacularly, but Gates judged that

the situation in Afghanistan required someone with very different skills and

background. Gates’s decision, however, is remarkable as much for its

uniqueness as anything else. By and large, the political level very rarely relieves

senior commanders for failure to perform effectively in COIN, and this

constitutes a great weakness of the contemporary system of high command.

ce integration of the civil-military effort is the fourth challenge of

supreme command in irregular warfare. cis occurs at the local level, of

course, particularly in innovative organizations like the Provincial

Reconstruction Teams, and has always occurred in irregular warfare—the

Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program in

Vietnam being the most successful example. In theory, military people

would argue for unity of command, one of those hoary principles of war

preached to second lieutenants and colonels alike. In practice, they do not

want it.cat is, neither they nor their civilian counterparts (ambassadors, for

the most part) want the military and civilian side of a COIN to serve under

one organization with one boss. It is more convenient, if ultimately

debilitating, to have organizations “sticking to their lanes”and coordinating

rather than unifying their efforts.

ce absence of unity of command bedeviled our efforts in Iraq and, to

a lesser extent, in Afghanistan. Instead, American commanders and

diplomats proclaimed the merits of unity of effort a second best.To be sure,

the relationship between General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C.

Crocker in Iraq was a marvelous example of just how well this relationship

could work. But we should not draw too much from this experience. It

22

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
required extreme effort, down to the virtual collocation of their offices. It

required the qualities of a superb diplomat who could deal effectively not

only with fractious Iraqis, but with a brilliant, and very intense, four-star

general. Crockers and Petraeuses are rare.

ce locus of decision making requires, in itself, a decision. American

counterinsurgencies (with the exception of the American Revolution and

the Reconstruction) have taken place somewhere else, in the context of a

coalition war conducted with and on behalf of a local ally. Americans will

wish to decentralize many of our decisions. Our ally, for whom the issues

concern political and even personal survival, will wish to centralize theirs. A

very good example of this concerns reconciliation of enemy insurgents. We

would prefer to leave this to the field; our allies will insist that their central

government make the decisions. Given the importance of reconciliation in

ending an insurgency, and given the political stakes involved, this is a tug of

war the local ally will win.

Between the efficacy of military and civilian organizations there is little

to choose. ce military will always outrun the civilians in a COIN. It will

have vastly greater numbers of people and resources, it will control security,

and it will have some skills (planning in particular) that the diplomats and

aid professionals will lack. But it is the civilians who will always control the

most important account—institution building. cere is thus a built-in

asymmetry that will be felt in Washington as well as in the field, at the level

of the secretary of defense and the secretary of state, but also at the different

levels of interagency working groups and in the field.

ce fifth challenge for supreme command in irregular warfare is the

need for strategic patience. Sometimes in conventional war it is the job of

the civilian leadership to push generals to move before they feel ready. Just

the reverse often holds true in COIN. cat is to say civilian leaders must

prepare people to be patient.cis means speaking directly and often to their

domestic audience, but to the military as well, preparing everyone involved

for extended conflict. In COIN, as in all war, raw persistence matters

enormously. Often, it dominates intellect. A clever strategy means little if

you cannot stick to the course, and many mistakes can be redeemed by

dogged willingness to muddle through.

ce sixth and final challenge concerns alliance relationships. As noted

above, these kinds of wars are about survival for the host government, which

23

Supreme Command in Irregular Warfare
gives them an enormous amount of strength in negotiating with a

superpower patron. cey risk their survival; we do not risk ours. And so in

the negotiations that invariably go on at the top level between us and our

local ally, they often have the stronger negotiating position.

cere are other alliance dimensions to these conflicts. In Iraq and

Afghanistan we have sought to conduct coalition COIN and have run into

the limits of what can be done. While some of our allies—at the upper end,

the British, but also smaller allies such as Denmark—will throw themselves

in almost as fully as we will, others will not, handcuffing themselves with all

kinds of caveats and self-imposed restraints that can actually create havens

for an enemy who knows who is serious about fighting him and who is not.

And even the more capable allies may have policy outlooks different from

ours, or lack some of the tools that we have. In this case, the arithmetic of

alliance does not mean that two U.S. soldiers plus two allied soldiers equals

four equally effective counterinsurgent soldiers. In some cases two plus two

will equal three, or two, or even fewer. And this is without considering the

extraordinarily complicating relationships we have set up with the UN,

NATO, and various nongovernmental organizations. One major area that

will require study in the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan should be a

candid appraisal of how much effort we should put into making these

coalition exercises, and a realistic appraisal of what the cost for doing so is.

How has the Washington political leadership exercised supreme

command? Here we have seen a number of innovations. Secure video

teleconferencing between Washington and the theater has had a huge effect,

allowing the president to establish a direct personal relationship with his

counterpart in Iraq or Afghanistan, as well as with his commanders there.

ce consequences may be mixed, but technological feasibility usually

induces leaders to establish this kind of personal contact. On the whole, and

although people in the field would rather hear from Washington by carrier

pigeon, it is a good thing. Personal relationships with political counterparts

and military subordinates allow a president to act more effectively in a crisis,

to take the measure of his subordinates and inspire them, and, if he is skillful,

to learn more about what is going on than simply by reading.

An administrative innovation in the George W. Bush administration was

an interagency version of the “directed telescope” that Napoleon and

Wellington used in the early nineteenth century. cose commanders would

24

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
send trusted subordinates to parts of the battlefield to investigate and report

back swiftly. In the Bush administration, Lieutenant General Douglas E. Lute,

as deputy national security advisor, would go to Iraq and Afghanistan every

couple of months for about ten days at a time. I went with him and several

other defense and state counterparts, to have meetings in the capitals and then

get a sense for what was transpiring in the field. It proved an invaluable means

for keeping a key level of government—the level that supported the cabinet

sectaries and the president—in close touch with the field.

Special envoys, a feature of the Obama administration, seem to me a less

promising innovation.To whom do they really report? ce president or the

secretary of state? If they come from the State Department, how do they

interact with the Department of Defense? What territory do they cover?

Which bureaucracy do you put behind them? ce deputy national security

adviser position specifically for the management of a war has proven a far

more effective way of coordinating the government’s efforts. ce Bush

administration, in this respect, returned to the practice of the late Johnson

administration in recreating the role played by Robert W. Komer.

In my book, Supreme Command, I advocate an unequal dialogue

between civilian and military leadership. Unequal because the civilians

ultimately call the shots, but a dialogue that requires the utmost in military

candor with its superiors.ce big decisions in any war—to include COIN—

will prove contentious. cere was very divided military opinion about the

surge in Iraq in 2007, for example.ce civilians must seek out those divisions

and have them argued out in front of the president. But none of this should

take place in public, particularly with regard to irregular warfare disputes

about big issues of strategy that have large and disturbing effects on what

transpires on the ground. Friends, enemies, and most important those who

have not yet made up their minds watch CNN (Cable News Network). In

particular they seek to discover how much resolution American leaders have.

In all wars, including these, brains matter. But if your enemies, your allies,

and your own people begin to think you lack heart, no clever strategies or

brilliantly conceived doctrine will yield up victory.

25

Supreme Command in Irregular Warfare



Qe Art of Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency

by Brigadier General H. R. McMaster, USA

cere are five points that are relevant at the brigade level in terms of

operations in counterinsurgency (COIN) environments, and a few others

relevant to preparing units for effective operations in a COIN environment.

cere is a qualifier. Here, I am focusing on the brigade level, which is

good and wholly appropriate, but I think it’s important to understand that

success in these wars really depends on effective operations at much lower

levels, such as at the platoon, company, and battalion levels.

At the brigade level, we offer effective decentralized operations.

Brigade-level command provides resources, lays a conceptual foundation

for operations, and integrates the efforts of units so that they have

complementary effects across a wide area. ce brigade level also helps

integrate civil-military efforts as well as efforts at security and the

development of local forces. Finally, the brigade commander also helps

strengthen understanding of the relationship between our forces, the

indigenous forces, the population, and the enemy.

29

Chapter 3
I think we are in danger of exaggerating the level of agency that brigade

commanders actually have in counterinsurgencies. cere is also the danger

of underestimating the relative importance of local leaders. For example,

Iraqi General Najim Abed Al-Jabouri was the real hero of what we were

able to achieve in Tal Afar. He provided the leadership that was necessary

to move various communities toward the kind of accommodation necessary

to stop the sectarian civil war and allowed us to accomplish what we did

alongside the Iraqis.

ce first thing I’d like to discuss about effective operations is planning.

We have a process in place that was developed in the 1990s. It is an

oversystematized checklist that sometimes can be regarded as a substitute

for thought—and that’s the most dangerous thing that could happen in the

COIN environment.

One of the things our Army is doing now is focusing on design, framing

problems, and thinking broadly about them. All actions need to be based on

a political strategy. Failing to do this means security efforts can run counter

to political goals. As David Galula observed, politics becomes an active

instrument of operation in a COIN. And so intricate is the interplay

between the political and military actions that they cannot be totally

separated. Every military move must be weighed with regard to its political

effects and vice versa. Brigade leaders need to impart a high degree of

understanding across their organization about how their operations

contribute to the success of the political outcomes in the area of operation.

cis is relevant to the debates between COIN and raiding operations.

A raiding approach to COIN has its roots in strategic bombing theory.

cis is an easy way out of a complex situation. It has its roots also in the idea

of nodal analysis that was popular in the 1990s. cis posits that if you look

at an enemy organization—and these are conventional organizations—

establish what their key nodes are, and attack those nodes, then the

organization will collapse.cis has been grafted to the problems of terrorism

and insurgency that we face today. ce raiding approach is problematic

because it fails to address the fundamental causes of violence and insecurity.

It does not address defeating the enemy because one has to defeat the enemy

in relation to securing the population in a COIN. In many ways, the raiding

approach actually aids the enemy because the actions can strengthen the

enemy’s disinformation and propaganda campaign.

30

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
ce raiding approach is appealing. It allows military officers to get at the

enemy and acquire immediate feedback. ce commander obtains metrics

out of the raids, such as how many leaders the attack killed and captured.

But the danger is that a commander can confuse activity with progress. It

is only part of the solution, and in extreme cases can actually be detrimental

to the commander’s efforts.

cus, the conceptual foundation needs to be joined with the political

strategy.

Now I will turn to the five keys to effective operations at the brigade level.

ce first is situational understanding. ce wars of the 1990s have been

a corrective to what you might call the orthodoxy of defense transformation

in the revolution in military affairs.We understand now that war is complex.

War is complex and uncertain because of all sorts of factors. ce ethnic,

tribal, sectarian dimensions and dynamics at the local area that we are

confronting and how those influence the relative strength of our efforts in

combination with the indigenous leaders and forces we are working with

relative to those of the enemy stand as key elements of current warfare.

During the 1990s, however, the Army’s capstone document on

situational understanding stipulated that command-and-control systems

would enable leaders to know more than ever before about the activities in

their battlespace. cey would have accurate information regarding the civil

population, weather, terrain, and the locations of both friendlies and the

enemy. Consequently, the need for forces in a particular area would be

greatly reduced.

What we have learned since is that human, psychological, political, and

cultural dimensions keep war firmly in the realm of uncertainty. What we

have to do is figuratively and literally fight to achieve situational

understanding. Preparation is critical to achieving this. Learning the history

of a particular area is immensely important. Situational understanding

comes from the bottom up. It comes from interacting with the population

and effective reconnaissance operations. Every mission that we conduct in

Iraq or Afghanistan is either an area-security or an area-reconnaissance

mission to confirm or deny something, so it is important to maintain

competencies in reconnaissance and collection of human intelligence.

31

Qe Art of Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency
It is important to see and understand the enemy’s network structure. It

is important to understand how the enemy network bridges into

government, security forces, and illicit and criminal networks so that we can

understand the whole problem and how the enemy links the military

battleground with the all-important political battleground. cese are the

battlegrounds that exist in government and security institutions

ce other battleground is that of perception, information, and strategic

communication. ce goals are to understand the nature of the enemy’s

disinformation and propaganda campaign and understand why that

message might resonate with the population. ce impact of the enemy’s

message on the population must be understood before you can effectively

counter their campaign.

cere is a broad range of questions brigade commanders should always

ask themselves. As Sun Tzu postulated, leaders need to understand the

enemy strategy to defeat that strategy. To do that, commanders need to

understand the enemy’s sources of strength and support so they can isolate

the enemy from them. cese sources are both physical and psychological.

Brigade commanders need to understand what the enemy’s vulnerabilities

and weaknesses are so they can attack those vulnerabilities with both

physical force and an effective psychological information campaign.

No matter how effective we are at understanding and learning about an

environment, we are not going to know more about Iraq than the Iraqis or

more about Afghanistan than the Afghans. cerefore, the most important

thing to do in terms of situational understanding is to open a dialogue with

the people who live there. In these areas, people are trying to influence you

as well as inform you. If a commander understands enough about the

dynamics, he can evaluate the sources of information and triangulate issues.

I believe that everything we want to know about Iraq and Afghanistan can

be discovered by asking the people who are already cooperating with us.ce

most important approach may be consulting with and listening to

indigenous leaders and to the broader population as a whole.

Alongside situational understanding, the second element of effective

brigade command is to conduct effective military operations. As noted, these

are largely area-security and area-reconnaissance operations. It is important

to relentlessly pursue the enemy and to overwhelm him in every

32

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
engagement. Some have created the false dilemma that in regular wars (that

term is vague and imprecise) the goal is to destroy the enemy and in irregular

wars the goal is to hand out frozen chickens and Beanie Babies to win over

the population. In fact, we are facing brutal, determined, murderous enemies

who now can avail themselves of capabilities that were only previously in

fielded forces in terms of armor penetrating capability and explosive power.

So, there is no substitute for the combat prowess of our forces and our ability

to defeat the enemy in every engagement. Nevertheless, it is important to

make sure that you inculcate in your unit the judgment and understanding

that you have to apply firepower with discipline and discrimination. It is

important that commanders maintain focus on combined air-ground arms

because what this enemy banks on is being able to make and break contact

on their own terms. Brigade commanders want to gain and maintain contact

with enemy forces by ensuring that they position units at all times in area

security and reconnaissance operations and that they mutually support and

talk to each other, and can immediately respond to any situation. ce units

will ensure that the enemy cannot break contact and has to subsequently

respond to multiple forces, approaching from multiple forms of contact: air,

ground, overwhelming direct fire, infantry, and mobile protective firepower.

So, all arms doctrine works. Contrary to the general opinion that we

are losing some capabilities in our force because of the enemy we are

fighting, we still have a high degree of combined arms competency at the

company and battalion levels.

ce third element of capable brigade command in COIN operations is

effective information operations, which entails a wide range of components.

Commanders have to expose the enemy’s brutality, clarify their intentions,

counter the enemy’s disinformation campaigns, and bolster the legitimacy

of their allied forces. cey need to address the fears and aspirations of

communities and send a simple, clear message to the population.

ce fourth component of command is to achieve unity of effort with

indigenous leaders. Effective brigade commanders have to work together

with the local security, civil, and political leadership. cis involves building

and understanding relationships of mutual trust and common purpose.

cere needs to be an understanding of where interests might diverge and

anticipating these differences so the common enemy cannot take advantage

of these disagreements.

33

Qe Art of Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency
ce fifth element is that brigade leaders need to consolidate their

units’ gains. In a COIN, we cannot afford to have transitory and

temporary successes that are quickly reversed by the enemy. Efforts of

consolidation include supporting local governance; establishing the rule

of law; rekindling hope among the population; getting basic services

running; and, most important, building indigenous police and army forces.

cese forces need to be able to deal with current and future threats and

enjoy the legitimacy and trust of the population.

34

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond


Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency Operations:

Lessons from the Iraq War

by Colonel Peter R. Mansoor, USA (Retired)

Command in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations exhibits many

of the same characteristics as command in high-intensity, conventional

warfare, but there are many added considerations that make the job more

complex, if not more difficult. Success in both types of operations requires

inspired leadership. Commanders must balance mission accomplishment

with soldier welfare. cey must synchronize the contributions of

supporting arms and services to maximize the effectiveness of the force.

ce enemy, while using different tactics, still gets a vote. Despite these

similarities, the job of a commander in COIN operations is made more

complex by the numerous, varied skills required to achieve success. It is

not true, as Army Chief of Staff General George H. Decker stated to

President John F. Kennedy, that “any good soldier can handle guerrillas”;

this is not the case with guerrillas who are competent and backed by a

37

Chapter 4
popular insurgency.1 Indeed, commanders in COIN operations have to

focus on more than just killing the enemy and taking and holding ground,

as in conventional warfighting. Commanders battling an insurgency must

complement security operations by developing and engaging local political

leaders, improving the economy to put people to work and eliminating

joblessness as an excuse for supporting the insurgents, developing local

governments to provide the population with essential services, and

conducting an informational campaign that is critical to success and not

just an adjunct of combat operations. Commanders must orchestrate the

varied and essential efforts of interagency, international, and

nongovernmental organizations. Furthermore, they must do this while

decentralizing authority and empowering junior leaders upon whose

shoulders victory or defeat at the all-important local level rests. After

examining the many and varied tasks that fall the way of a commander in

COIN operations, one must agree with T. E. Lawrence’s statement:

“Irregular warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.”2

Building Relationships

Perhaps the most important facet of command in COIN operations is

the development of relationships with local leaders and other influential

people. Unless supported by a strong outside power, insurgents ultimately

must gain and maintain the support of the people to overturn the existing

government. ce engagement of local elites is therefore critical to

influencing the population to support one side or the other in this struggle

for legitimacy, especially in highly tribal societies where people tend to

adhere more closely to familial and social groupings. cese elites may

include politicians, military and police leaders, religious leaders, or informal

leaders from the business or educational communities or other groupings.

ce real leader of a community may not initially be readily apparent, so the

commander must work to understand the power relationships at work and

seek to engage the real leaders of the people. Indeed, T. E. Lawrence’s

admonition to his fellow officers applies to U.S. officers in Iraq and

38

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

1 Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr.,Qe Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1986), 37.

2 T. E. Lawrence, “ce Evolution of a Revolt,”Army Quarterly and Defence Journal, I:1 (October 1920).
Afghanistan today as well: “Go easy just for the first few weeks. A bad start

is difficult to atone for, and the Arabs form their judgments on externals

that we ignore. When you have reached the inner circle in a tribe, you can

do as you please with yourself and them.”3

Engaging the local community is a team effort in more ways than

one. Unless a commander has excellent linguistic abilities, he/she must

find a talented interpreter and learn how to use him/her properly.

Handled correctly, a good interpreter can be an extremely valuable asset

to a commander and can assist in evaluating body language and context

as well as the spoken word. In crucial situations the commander should

not be afraid to have the interpreter clarify a conversation, for

mistranslations can prove deadly in more ways than one.4

ce task of establishing and nurturing relationships with local elites

cannot be delegated to the civil affairs officer or another person. ce local

people know who is in charge in a given area and will seek to engage that

leader in a close relationship. A commander has wasta, the Arabic word for

influence, and local elites will seek to capitalize on their relationship with the

commander to share in this power. In many societies, personal relationships

lead to political support, business dealings, and other important associations

that can influence the outcome of a COIN conflict. ce commander must

spend a significant amount of time fostering these relationships and not

view such time as detracting from seemingly more important duties.

After a tour in Iraq from June 2003 to July 2004 as the commander of

the Army’s 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, I returned with my unit to

Germany to reconstitute and retrain the organization in preparation for its

next deployment to the Land of the Two Rivers. After a year of repairing

and replacing equipment, integrating new replacements, and retraining, the

brigade conducted a rotation in June 2004 at the Combat Maneuver

Training Center in Hohenfels, Germany. cis ten-day exercise combined

COIN training with a few days of conventional combat against opposing

forces configured as a hybrid insurgent/conventional force. Local German

civilians played the role of villagers, local leaders, and other people with

39

Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency Operations: Lessons from the Iraq War

3 T. E. Lawrence, “Twenty-Seven Articles,” Arab Bulletin, 20 August 1917.

4 For an example, see Peter R. Mansoor, Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 214–16 and 227–28.
whom a force would have to engage in COIN operations. As I did in Iraq

during my previous tour, I spent a considerable amount of time engaging the

local “leaders” in this training scenario. During one eventful meeting, local

“elites” pressed me for favors and showered me with complaints, to which I

calmly responded. After five hours, I was just getting warmed up (many

engagements in Iraq had lasted well into the evening hours); the locals grew

tired, said their goodbyes, and departed.ce observers commented later that

the meeting had gone three times longer than any previous engagement,

which had always ended with the brigade commander excusing himself to

attend to “more important duties.” I was used to delegating those other

functions to subordinate leaders; to me, the engagement of these local elites

was my most important task.

Communicating with the Public

In COIN warfare, perceptions are often more important than reality. If

the local people believe the insurgents are winning, then they are winning.

If the American people believe we are losing, then we are losing, despite the

realities of the battlefield. ce Tet Offensive in 1968 is a case in point. ce

offensive was a huge tactical and operational success for U.S. and South

Vietnamese forces, which succeeded in eliminating a large chunk of the Viet

Cong in less than six months. Tet was a strategic failure, however, because

the American people believed the offensive showed the enemy had far

greater strength than they had been told, and therefore the pressure to

withdraw U.S. forces from the conflict became unstoppable.

Because of the importance of these perceptions, a commander in COIN

operations must build an information campaign to influence the local

population and a public affairs campaign to inform the wider audience

before embarking on operations. ce most important piece of the

information campaign is to build a narrative—a key means through which

the counterinsurgents can express their purpose to the people. To be

effective, the narrative must be short and easily understood. In Iraq, for

instance, al-Qaeda operatives used a form of the following narrative to

appeal to Sunni tribesmen: “You’re Sunni, we’re Sunni, we both hate the

Persians [i.e., Shiites] and the Americans—let’s fight them together.”Stories

linked to Islamic history or the 1920 Iraqi tribal rebellion against the British

also played heavily in insurgent narratives. ce American narrative in

40

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
41

Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency Operations: Lessons from the Iraq War

2003—that we came to Iraq as liberators to free the oppressed Iraqi

people—was not believed by many Iraqis who suspected more nefarious

motives, be they realpolitik or the seizure of Iraqi oil. A narrative that

worked was, “Let’s rebuild Iraq together.” When an Iraqi would ask me

where I was from, my answer was Rusafa, the Baghdad province that housed

my brigade headquarters. Unfortunately, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from

their forward operating bases inside Baghdad in spring 2004 invalidated

this narrative because Iraqis inside Baghdad viewed the withdrawal

suspiciously, rather than accepting the stated motive that we were merely

empowering local Iraqi security forces that in reality did not exist.

Once a commander has built a narrative (and tested it out on the local

people), he/she must use every means available to communicate it to the

population: TV, radio, newspapers, flyers, and even the rumor mill.ce key

is to use the means most widely available to the people. In Iraq, this meant

using satellite TV to broadcast messages, something that U.S. forces were

quite unprepared to do early in the war.

A commander must engage the media and encourage his/her

subordinates to do likewise. ce public affairs plan must cover all media—

local, national (e.g., Al Iraqiya), regional (e.g., Al Jazeera), international (e.g.,

BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation]), and U.S. (e.g., Fox News and

CNN [Cable News Network]). ce media will report on events regardless

of whether or not a commander engages reporters, so it is best to suit up and

get in the game. If you don’t play, you lose by default. ce best policy is to

be forthright; don’t spin news or put lipstick on pigs. A commander should

demand three things of the media: factual accuracy, the correct context for

stories, and proper characterization of the situation and people involved.

When the media falls short of its professional standards, the commander

should engage and demand clarifications and retractions as appropriate.cis

is a two-way street; the commander should also be forthright with his/her

statements and issue follow-ups as necessary to ensure the media is

informed of a developing situation.

Combat Operations

Commanders of conventional forces, trained in high-intensity combat

operations and taught to be aggressive in seeking out and destroying the

enemy, must reorient their thinking for COIN warfare.ce mission in this
type of conflict is often focused on protection of the population, with killing

the enemy serving as a byproduct of the primary objective.Too much force

used too aggressively can alienate the population when collateral damage

kills or wounds innocent civilians and damages property. Even with the besttrained forces, some collateral damage will occur. Commanders must ensure

innocent victims are quickly and appropriately compensated for their loss.

Proportionality in the use of force is critical; commanders must set the tone

to ensure the ethical conduct of their troops. Given the sudden and horrific

nature of some attacks, leaders must curb the baser instinct of soldiers to

blame bystanders for the deaths and grievous injuries of their comrades.

ce commander should look at every situation from the enemy’s point

of view and engage his/her intelligence officer in a constant and ongoing

dialogue concerning the enemy’s capabilities and intentions. As is the case

with conventional combat operations, the enemy in COIN warfare has a

say in what happens. Commanders must consciously curb their more

aggressive instincts. Acting too quickly on intelligence, for instance, can

prove counterproductive.Target development in COIN warfare takes more

time, since human intelligence is often the basis for decision making and it

is, more often than not, slow to develop. Commanders should sequence

operations in time and space, a method I call cadenced targeting. cis

basically means commanders should slow the targeting cycle down to allow

intelligence to develop and reduce the number of false leads, which can

result in the detention of innocent people. In this regard, commanders

should personally examine their system for detention and interrogation to

ensure it is not only effective, but also humane. Commanders should be

personally involved in reviewing interrogation results and judging which

detainees should be sent outside the brigade area for incarceration and not

just take the word of the staff judge advocate or intelligence officer, as good

as these officers might be.

Brigade commanders should focus on the larger picture and work to

support battalion and company commanders with additional assets.ce key

is to decentralize operations and not do the battalion and company

commanders’ jobs for them. Micromanagement of COIN operations will

invariably lead to failure, as a single commander cannot make the myriad

decisions needed on a daily basis by junior leaders in the field and on the

streets. ce brigade commander should, however, ensure consistency in

policies and procedures throughout the area of operations.ce local people

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
will notice differences in various unit areas, and insurgents will take

advantage of any gaps and seams they find.

Most important, the brigade commander must ensure that other

security forces in his/her area are integrated into operations. A commander

should establish good working relationships with any Special Operations

Forces in the area, even if they do not fall under his/her span of command

and control.ce commander should pay close attention to the development

of and coordination with local security forces, even to the extent of using

brigade assets to support the advisory effort in the area. In the end, as T. E.

Lawrence notes, it is more important that indigenous forces execute

tolerably than it is for U.S. forces to execute perfectly,“for it is their war and

you are to help them, not to win it for them.”5

Humanitarian and Civic Action

COIN warfare may be more about winning the confidence and trust

of the people than it is about winning their hearts and minds. Security is

certainly a large part of that equation, for the fundamental basis for the

legitimacy of any governing authority is the ability to secure the people.

Beyond security, however, people everywhere want an adequate standard

of living (as defined by the local culture), a means to provide for their

family’s welfare, and a decent place to live. Counterinsurgents can increase

the legitimacy of the local governing authority by assisting it in providing

the people with a decent quality of life.

Commanders work to gain the trust and confidence of the population

through humanitarian and civic action programs. ce commander should

not delegate these activities to his/her civil affairs officer, for they are far too

important. One recent innovation that has proven successful in coordinating

these activities is the Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team (EPRT),

a means for linking interagency assets with military forces on the local level.

ce commander and the EPRT leader should work closely together. One

technique is for the brigade commander and EPRT leader to co-chair

regular meetings on humanitarian and civic actions that are separate from

the targeting meetings held to discuss kinetic operations. Separate meetings

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Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency Operations: Lessons from the Iraq War

5 Lawrence, “Twenty-Seven Articles.”
44

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

will provide humanitarian and civic actions with adequate time and

attention, while the commander’s presence will ensure that the outcomes

mesh with other activities in the brigade area, including combat operations.

As General David H. Petraeus noted, in COIN warfare, money is

ammunition.6 But the corollary is that money is an unguided projectile that

a commander must aim at the right target. ce temptation is to tackle a

number of projects that will make life in the community better, under the

assumption that the people will give the counterinsurgent forces credit for

the improvement in their quality of life. Such is not the case. In some

instances insurgents or militias will take credit for projects accomplished

with U.S. dollars, as was the case in Sadr City for much of the Iraq War,

where Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi militia claimed it was responsible

for projects accomplished with money allocated from the U.S. Commander’s

Emergency Response Program. In areas under insurgent intimidation or

control, the local people may accept reconstruction activities, but the resulting

thankfulness will not change their behavior one iota. In COIN warfare,

gratitude theory (i.e., “you do things for me and I’ll do things for you”) does

not work, as insurgent threats trump counterinsurgent good deeds. Instead,

commanders must use money and reconstruction activities to consciously

force the people to choose which side to support, perhaps by making the

local community provide a portion of the funds for specific projects. People

with some “skin in the game”will do more to ensure their equity is protected.

Commanders should also include local leaders in the decision-making

process for civic action projects. Getting buy-in and ownership of these

activities is an important step that commanders cannot overlook merely

because it takes more time to engage local leaders in the process.

Troop Welfare

Troop welfare in COIN operations is not too far removed from troop

welfare in high-intensity combat operations, but there are some differences

given the fact that a COIN conflict can go on for years. Repeated

deployments can wear troops down unless they are provided a decent

standard of support. In Iraq I focused on the “5 Ms” of soldier care:

6 LtGen David H. Petraeus, USA, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in

Iraq,” Military Review, January–February 2006.
• Meals: hot chow, varied menus

• Medical: cleanliness and adequacy of medical facilities

• Mail: to include email and phones

• Money: to ensure the home front remained happy

• Morale: latrines, showers, and entertainment

Twelve-month rotations, sometimes extended to as many as fifteen

months, can wear down even the hardiest of soldiers, particularly over

multiple deployments, so some degree of comfort makes sense.

On the other hand, commanders must also ensure the troops retain

an expeditionary mindset in case they need to pack up and move on a

moment’s notice. During the deployment of the 1st Brigade, 1st

Armored Division, to Iraq in 2003–04, there were two operations that

required substantial elements of the brigade to deploy within country on

short notice: Operation Longstreet in August–September 2003 and

Operation Iron Saber in south-central Iraq from April–June 2004. ce

troops were not so far removed from the initial invasion that they viewed

these movements as extraordinary. During the beginning of the surge in

February 2007, on the other hand, some soldiers who had grown so

accustomed to life on large bases found it initially difficult to adapt to the

more austere conditions of joint security stations and combat outposts,

with their more primitive quality of life. ce soldiers adjusted, but

commanders would do well to ensure their troops never lose their

expeditionary mindset in the first place.

Indigenous Leadership

Developing competent and supportive indigenous leaders is crucial to

COIN warfare, for U.S. forces cannot remain in foreign countries fighting

their wars indefinitely. Commanders should work to build trust with local

leaders by establishing social and professional connections and treating

them as equals (or superiors, if such is the case). Commanders should

include local leaders in orders and rehearsals to validate their status as

part of the team. Brigade commanders must work to build the

competency of local forces in their areas, for their success is of paramount

importance. Indigenous leaders have a number of home field advantages,

45

Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency Operations: Lessons from the Iraq War
and can capitalize on local intelligence sources; cultural expertise; social

connections; and language capabilities, which U.S. commanders would

do well to leverage.

cere might be situations (such as those that exist today in Afghanistan)

where sufficient numbers of competent local leaders simply do not exist to

staff the large number of formations needed to prosecute COIN warfare. In

this case, the United States might consider staffing local units with U.S.

commanders. An Afghan battalion commanded by a U.S. Army or Marine

Corps major with a small cadre of officers and noncommissioned officers to

fill subordinate command positions would make the creation of effective

combat units much easier. U.S. leaders could be changed out over time as

competent Afghan leaders emerge from the ranks.

At the same time, a number of local leaders will prove to be unsuitable

due to extremism or incompetence. Commanders must weed out

extremist/sectarian leaders who would use their forces for nefarious ends

(e.g., criminality, sectarian cleansing, death squad activity.). Ideally, the

United States would retain hiring and firing authority over the local forces

that it helped create, a model advocated by historian and COIN expert Bing

West.7 Realistically, few states will ever cede this piece of sovereignty to the

United States, so in practice U.S. leaders must intensively engage local

political and military authorities to force them to get rid of the worst of the

extremist and incompetent leaders. In September 2007 a report by retired

Marine General James L. Jones recommended the dissolution of the Iraqi

National Police force due to its highly sectarian behavior. Instead, General

Petraeus, commander of Multi National Force–Iraq, worked with Iraqi

leaders to clean up the force by changing out every brigade commander and

roughly two-thirds of the battalion commanders, some of them twice.8 By

the end of the surge, the Iraqi National Police force, while not a paragon of

virtue and still exhibiting sectarian behavior in some areas, was more of an

asset than a liability to sustainable stability in Iraq.

46

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

7 Francis J. “Bing” West, Qe Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq (New York: Random

House, 2008), 39–40.

8 Linda Robinson, Tell Me How Qis Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq

(New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 299 and 336.
Overhauling Professional Military Education

ce above discussion highlights the incredibly complex nature of

command in COIN warfare. Quite frankly, the military did not do terribly

well in preparing its leaders for this kind of combat in the run-up to the

wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. U.S. military forces have done much to adapt

to COIN warfare since then, but need to do more to enhance professional

military education (PME) to prepare leaders for these types of conflicts. If

PME is so important to the ability of U.S. officers to command forces in

COIN warfare—and I think it is—then the U.S. military should once again

treat it as a serious career gate, as indeed it was during the interwar period

between the end of the Great War (World War I) and the beginning of

World War II.

Many of the educational competencies—history, culture, languages—

needed in COIN operations are not adequately taught in PME

programs. Adding these fields of study to existing PME institutions will

merely result in watered-down programs that lack focus. A different

solution would be to send more officers to civilian graduate programs in

history, cultural anthropology, social sciences, area studies, and similar

fields. One suggestion is to take every captain who is selected for early

promotion to major and send him/her to a civilian graduate program for

twelve to twenty-four months to obtain a master’s degree before heading

to a command and general staff college for the intermediate-level

education. ce result of this initiative would be to ensure that nearly

every brigade and division commander of the future receives a master’s

degree from a civilian university along with standard PME, a change

that would enhance the intellectual capabilities of U.S. military senior

leadership in years to come.

As for PME itself, it is time to ramp up the difficulty level of our

command, general staff, and war colleges. Rather than making entrance an

inalienable right, we should require officers to pass a rigorous entrance

examination. Colleges should break up staff groups where a few officers

carry the load and force officers to conduct serious study on their own as well

as in small groups. ce common scenario used by some institutions that

pigeonholes the curriculum into a single area of the world should be

eliminated. Further changes should include assigning grades, creating an

order of merit list, and rewarding the top 25 percent of the class with the

47

Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency Operations: Lessons from the Iraq War
best assignments upon graduation, much as the military academies currently

do with their class rankings.

cere will be those who complain that such changes are just too hard to

implement in a force that is as busy as the military is today. Yet, providing

select officers a year to attend a civilian college is no different than granting

selected officers a second year after completion of intermediate-level

education to attend the School for Advanced Military Studies.To create less

pressure to move officers back into line units, Congress should authorize an

expanded pool of field grade officers in the force and extend the mandatory

retirement age by five years. Furthermore, the Army should eliminate S3/XO

(executive officer) assignments as career gates, which creates the time

pressure for majors to return to the force where “the real soldiering takes

place”—an attitude not shared in other eras in U.S. military history.

Indeed, we could look to the Army’s history for an alternative career

path. During the 1920s and 1930s, the prize assignment for Army officers

was selection for schooling at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. ce course itself

was an extremely difficult, five-and-a-half days a week affair.ce best officers

in each class were then offered follow-on assignments as instructors. ce

chosen few beyond that were assigned to the Army War College a bit later

in their careers. PME in the interwar period was serious business, the critical

path to career advancement. When the Army expanded dramatically during

World War II, it managed to find enough competent leaders to command its

formations, despite the lack of S3/XO time and field experience. More

important, its highly educated officer corps provided the backbone for higher

level staffs that in most cases performed well in the crucible of war, and that

got most of the key strategic decisions during the war right.

ce U.S. military would do well to reemphasize PME in the years

ahead, for irregular warfare is here to stay, and it is, as T. E. Lawrence

claimed, far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

48

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond


Regimental Command in Counterinsurgency

by Brigadier General W. Blake Crowe, USMC

I would like to discuss regimental combat team (RCT) operations.

ce RCT is a task-organized aggregation. I had the opportunity in June

to sit in on a teleconference with Brigadier General Lawrence D.

Nicholson, commander of the 2d Marine Expeditionary Brigade in

Afghanistan. One of the points he made as he addressed the General

Officer Warfighting Program in Quantico, Virginia, is that what he

experienced in Iraq and is prepared to experience in Afghanistan is what

RCT-2, RCT-7, and my command experienced in 2006–07. cese were

completely different operations than some regimental commanders in

Fallujah faced.

One significant lesson is that counterinsurgency (COIN) environments

are not all the same. A village, be it on the western Euphrates River valley,

is different from areas right outside of Fallujah. cese areas are both about

the size of South Carolina, so the operations are distributed over a wide

51

Chapter 5
geographic range. ce area commanders had relative autonomy, as I did

from the Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) commander. ce

commanders visited, but I was left to run that area of operations the way I

wanted to, working with our two partner Iraqi brigades.

Our area of operations began along the Syrian border and extended

down to the Jordanian border. We were also responsible for the MEF

security area, which extended to Saudi Arabia. cis was a large area and it

was not possible to be everywhere.cis situation forced us to work with the

locals and to work and play well with other units operating in the region,

such as the Special Operations Forces (SOF). But there in 2006, we were the

surrogate government. We did not have mayors at the time. ce provincial

governor was in Ramadi and he stayed there.Twice we were able to get him

out to western al-Anbar in the year I was there, and it took a regimentalsize operation to get him out to cities such as Baghdadi, Haditha, and

al-Qa’im. We spent nearly thirty days worth of planning to get him out

there because for us he was more important than the president of the United

States. I think Marines here would understand that.

Our first mayor came in six months into my deployment in al-Qa’im.

Lieutenant Colonel Dale Alford, commander of the 3d Battalion, 6th

Marines, was involved in setting the conditions for that success. We didn’t

have a mayor in Haditha because we had to arrest him. He was an insurgent.

We didn’t have a mayor in Hit because the previous ones had been killed.

So until December 2006, we were the surrogate local government. We

learned very quickly that if we allowed the Iraqis to fail to build and

provision their security forces, then we would have failed as well. So, we had

to step in and fill that surrogate role.

cere is a debate concerning these operations and whether or not they

are counterinsurgencies, hybrid operations, or distributed operations. We

did them all. In al-Qa’im, we conducted what I would call a pure COIN

because the conditions had been set by the previous regiment. We were still

having major manned gun, tank rounds, and combined arms in downtown

Hit with more than one hundred surging on twelve- to fifteen-man

positions. And so we did the whole gamut out there. Phasing, synchronizing,

supporting, and enabling formed what I thought was my primary role there.

Every battalion commander wants to be the main effort. Every

regimental or brigade commander wants to be the main effort. We weren’t

52

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
the main effort in Iraq. And every battalion could not be the main effort, and

that’s the hard thing for people to reconcile. How come I’m not getting all

these assets?

When I was in Afghanistan, I received everything. We were one Marine

battalion attached to the Army and we were given everything. In Iraq, I had five

battalions in my command and one reduced Force Reconnaissance company

commanded by six lieutenant colonels. At least one unit is not going to get what

they want in a timely fashion. ce battalions, companies, and platoons had

autonomy, but autonomy doesn’t mean that they operated independently.cat’s

where synchronizing comes in. It means going out and working very close to the

battalions and blurring the borders between zones of responsibility and forcing

commanders to get together and have a cup of coffee. Just as we needed to have

tea with the local nationals, we also needed to do that among ourselves. We did

that very well with the SOF. I put liaisons with the national-level SOF. I put

liaisons with the white SOF. Every morning at 0800, I had the advanced

operating base commander from the SOF detachment in my office with the

signal and human intelligence. It was basically our own little fusion cell. We

established an ad-hoc tactical fusion center at the regimental level, and so I

would advocate that for future RCT operations.

As in all American military campaigns, a lot of manpower gets sucked up

into the higher headquarters.cese tend to have more people than the battalions

on the ground. ce Marine Corps has evolved to a point that intelligence cells

are down to company level. People are being pulled at the higher headquarters,

whereas we’re feeding the beast. I think the beast shouldn’t be higher. I think the

beast should be at the level of the lance corporal, corporal, sergeant leading the

patrol, and the lieutenant out on point.

I mentioned quickly the key traits of people. We put a lot of emphasis on

that during the entire deployment. We didn’t wait for policy to come down. A

former boss of mine said,“Common sense is not a common virtue.”I think you

figure out what you need to do out there and you do it. And you work with

the commanding general staff to figure out the legal ways of doing it.

As an example, we raised close to 4,000 police officers. I waited a year

and was told the police stations are coming. cey never did. So we created

expeditionary forward operating bases, because that way I could use Marine

Corps money. I could put police in them, although they could not be

designated official Iraqi Police stations. If it was designated as such, you

53

Regimental Command in Counterinsurgency
would get reported because it would not be official. So, there are things that

you have to do. It’s not selective disobedience of orders, but rather a creative

way of getting the mission accomplished.

We had two force protection measures: the American standard and

what was acceptable to the Iraqis. cat was unacceptable to me as a

commander. ce first time you go to a scene where you’ve lost a soldier, it

does not matter what uniform he’s wearing. He is one of ours. He was

bought in to serve with us and I don’t care what nationality he is.We needed

to build it to one standard: checkpoints, force protection, food, weapons,

ammunition, all the way down. cey fight with us and we’re going to treat

them to our standard. cat’s just nonnegotiable.

I was at Training and Education Command prior to taking over the

regiment. ce feedback loop is pretty fast in the Marine Corps. It’s kind of

like this. General James N. Mattis picking up the phone and calling Major

General T. S. Jones and saying, “Build us something—Matilda Village is

closed at March Air Force Base—build us something at Twentynine Palms

for General Stephen T. Johnson and II MEF to have when they go back

over. Do it now.” And we did it.

ce feedback loop to the training and education continuum, through

the School of Infantry and Expeditionary Warfare School, are producing

the finest officers we’ve ever had. Can we be better? Yes, we can. And how

we can do that? I was very fortunate as regimental commander to have the

assessments of every battalion and their company commanders at the

Mojave Viper predeployment operation training exercises. When I arrived

in Iraq, I hadn’t trained with them because we deploy a little differently than

the Army. I didn’t know these individuals. However, the assessments were

almost 99 percent spot on to what kind of unit I was receiving. Was it a

learning organization? Were they not a learning organization? And it went

down by personalities.

ce only thing I would suggest for improving that system is that we do

a proper, credible evaluation at home station prior to getting to Mojave

Viper, to act on some of the recommendations that are made here, picking

the right company and battalion commanders who are identified early in

the process. We can’t identify it at Mojave Viper because in many cases the

battalions deploy within thirty days after predeployment exercises.

My recommendation is that we need to figure out the methodology.

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond


Qe Art of Battalion Command in

Counterinsurgency: A Discussion

Honorable Francis J. “Bing” West; Colonel David J. Furness, USMC;

Colonel William M. Jurney, USMC; and Colonel Julian Dale Alford, USMC

Francis J. “Bing” West

cis panel deals with fighting in the trenches, the tackling and blocking

that happens up front in the line. What you have received about these

gentlemen really does not tell you the reason that they’re here. When we

were in Ramadi, a lot of people, including myself, didn’t think it could be

brought under control. William M. Jurney was the battalion commander

who did it. And Dale Alford, of course, is a legend because he went out to

al-Qa’im, 250 miles from Baghdad, the Syrian border town that was just

totally out of control. With one battalion, he established not only control,

but managed to work with the tribes so that after he left, it remained quiet.

Everyone felt that on the Syrian border this just couldn’t be done. And so

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Chapter 6
you do have the opportunity this morning of listening to a few people whose

credentials are just absolutely remarkable.

I’ve been to Afghanistan four times. I was there in April and May 2009

and again in June and July 2009 and went on about forty combat patrols up

north and down south.What really concerns me—and it’s very, very simple—

every valley has a mountain. And all the mountains are controlled by the

Taliban, and the watchers are everywhere. No American or Afghan patrol

leaves the wire without being watched and reported on the whole way. And

I’ll tell you H. R. [McMaster], that really concerns me because it indicates

that there’s a substrata of that society that we’re dealing with, and if

everywhere you go they’re watching you all the time, this is a big, big problem.

ce way in which all the firefights had been taking place up until the last

couple of months was very simple.We were fighting Apaches who remained

very well hidden. You’d never get a distinct target and generally the ranges

were 400 to 600 meters. cis is in the Korengal, and we’re firing at targets

that were firing at us 600 meters away, but you had to go down a valley and

up the other side, so there’s no way you could close with them. So, we

automatically called in air strikes.

General H. R. McMaster was talking about company commanders

having these indirect fires at their disposal. Yes, every single patrol has it,

but we now have a new tactical directive that says,“Knock off using most

of it because you’re also killing civilians.”cat leads to a very big problem

about what takes its place. And there is another element in Afghanistan

that concerns me. In Ganjgal, we looked back from our MRAP [mine

resistant, ambush protected vehicle] to see kids coming out right behind

us putting down rocks in order to trap us. We did everything according

to the book on counterinsurgency, and they betrayed the Marines and

Afghan soldiers when they went into that village and that’s why they

were all killed.

So there are some hearts and minds that you’re just not going to win.

ce politics of each valley differ, but every single battlespace owner, every

single battalion commander that we now have in Afghanistan, could come

to this meeting, give you a map of his area, and take a red line and show you

the areas where he cannot go without getting into a firefight.

ce dilemma that we’re going to be facing in the future is that the more

we have constrained our indirect fires, which has been the principal way in

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
which we were doing this, you leave two big questions dangling out there at

the battalion level: how do you finish the firefights, and where are we going?

Right now we’re not finishing firefights, so we’re basically not doing

damage to the enemy.ce enemy isn’t doing damage to us because we have

our armor. But we now have attrition warfare. We don’t have mobility

warfare.ce Taliban run circles around us because they’re not wearing heavy

armor. cey’re in much better shape, they’re in incredible shape. And as a

result, they hold the initiative.cey decide when to initiate a firefight.cey

decide when to stop the firefight. And we react to them, and we’re not

finishing the firefights. So we’re not killing the enemy.

Now, are we arresting the enemy? Excuse me, I used to say “detain” or

something. Now we say “arrest.” No. ce Afghans arrest practically no one.

And the average number of arrests for an American battalion is one person

every two months.

So we’re not killing them and we’re not arresting them. cus, the

blocking and tackling that are fundamentally essential are right now lacking.

We can put in more troops, but my concern about this is, if we don’t find a

way of finishing these fights, we could be having this conversation a year to

two years from now and the Taliban would still be intact.

cat leads to the second question: where are we going? Basically, if we’re

managing what we measure, we have some adjusting to do in what it is we

think we’re going to be doing in Afghanistan.ce question is,“What is our

theory of victory?” It seems to me if you read the assessment that General

H. R. McMaster and others worked on, you read the assessment that

General Stanley A. McChrystal came out with the other day and you read

it very carefully, its theory of victory is not victory—it’s transition. And when

you look for how we transition, it becomes a little bit fuzzy. If transition is

the name of the game, then the very best paper I’ve ever seen on it was

written by Major General Robert B. Neller when he was an obscure

brigadier general out in Okinawa. It’s the best single paper that I’ve ever

seen about how you transition. But the problem we now have with the

Afghan Army is very simple. We built it in our image. cey’re all wearing

armor. cey’re all wearing helmets. cey are no more mobile than we are.

When you get into the firefight, they immediately turn to the advisor

because only the advisor is permitted to call in the indirect fires.ce minute

you call in the indirect fires, you’re positioning the troops, you become the

leader in the combat.

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Qe Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: A Discussion
ce Afghan leaders are absolutely the key to the success, but Mark

Moyar has this fascinating section in his book where he interviewed

something like 250 advisors. cey estimated that 65 percent of all Afghan

battalions have poor leaders. And yet, our advisors have about zero effect

on promotions in the Afghan system. I know that Peter Mansoor said Bing

West is for these joint promotion boards, but General David H. Petraeus

had another way of doing it. I think we’re out of time for being gentle in

Afghanistan, and if we’re going to make a difference, I think we have to get

more control over who’s in charge in the Afghan Army.

Colonel David J. Furness

Battalion command in counterinsurgency operations has kind of a

broad left and right lateral limit, so I’ll confine my comments to actions that

we took prior to and while in combat.

cere are no new ideas here. cere’s nothing earth shattering. Most

were borrowed from peers who I respect, like the two gentlemen to my right.

cese are things I learned while I served on the staff of the 1st Marine

Division in 2003 and 2004, and things that I read through self-study. I tried

to apply them in a dynamic environment, and here are some of the lessons

that I learned.

My experience is all based in southern Baghdad in 2005 when I was

commanding officer of Battalion Landing Team 1st Battalion, 1st Marines,

the ground combat element of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit. And

then in 2006 at a place north of Fallujah, Karmah, or “Bad Karmah,” as we

liked to refer to it. But it was all eastern al-Anbar province, western Baghdad.

Karmah is about 10 kilometers northeast of Fallujah. It is surrounded

by small villages that were my principal population centers in and around the

area. I had part of the northern Zadon, which was kind of a no-man’s-land

at times. But this is the area in 2006 that I operated in when I was attached

to Regimental Combat Team 5.

It is a decentralized fight. Everybody agrees with that. And if you’re

going to be successful in a decentralized fight, you have to operate on

commander’s intent. No one will dispute that. But how do you get people

to understand intent and be able to use intent? No one really tells you

about that.

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
I learned from watching General James N. Mattis at the division level go

down to the PFC [private first class] level and just embed his ideas, his

thought process, what was important to him, down to the private. I said okay,

that’s what I have to do when I get a battalion command.

Everybody has a philosophy of command, philosophy of training,

philosophies of this and that, and I’m no different. I came into command

with them and spent a lot of time trying to craft a language that actually

meant something. I handed those things out. I had a one-pager for the

Marines and NCOs [noncommissioned officers]. I had a more complex, little

longer version for staff NCOs and officers. I gave them out. I had them read

them, and then in groups of twenty, platoon size, I went around after they

were read and we had discussions.We had team meetings.What am I talking

about when I say this? What does this mean? What am I telling you to do?

You try to operationalize intent because you want them to understand

it so that when they’re at that point where they have to make a decision and

no one’s around and it’s only corporal so and so, he can do it. He knows

what Furness would want him to do and that’s probably the only thing—if

that’s the only thing—he can remember, it’s something he can fall back on

and, hopefully, it gets him through that difficult decision.

So, I think that’s the most important thing that you have to do right up

front as a battalion commander. You’ve got to put your fingerprints on your

unit right from the start, the first day you grab the guidon. And once they

understand it, then you reinforce that every day by what General Charles C.

Krulak used to call “leadership by walking around.”You’ve got to get out of

your office, you’ve got to get away from the computer, and you’ve got to talk

to your Marines, and sailors—where they work, what they care about, and

everything they do. You give them a little “that’s the way I want it done,”pat

on the back, or “hey, next time you do it, how about his way, you’re doing a

great job.” But you have to imprint what you feel is important into their

brain housing groups.

ce next point, individual small unit discipline, is the key in

counterinsurgency. General Anthony Zinni once said that elite units are

better at counterinsurgency because they have greater discipline. And

discipline is what’s going to give you restraint, which is going to give you

discrimination in the use of fires, and it’s the bedrock on which everything

else is built. So you have to instill it. With our op tempo going one hundred

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Qe Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: A Discussion
miles an hour, discipline can sometimes fall by the wayside because we don’t

have time to correct it right on the spot. You know, “We’ll get to that later.”

Well, you can’t do that.

Somebody said,“If you could do anything to a battalion to prepare it for

counterinsurgency operations, what would you do?” I thought for a minute

and said, “I’d put them through recruit training, all as a group, and let a

bunch of gunnies with Smokey Bear hats just beat discipline into them for

13 weeks.”ce tactics are fairly simple but the discipline is hard to instill.

I had a long talk with staff NCOs and NCOs about their role in helping

me attain a level of individual and small-unit discipline that would carry

the day when we got into this dispersed dynamic environment. And I also

told them, “Your discipline will be your hallmark and it’s the only

information operations message that as a small unit in Iraq you control. You

control how you’re perceived by the population, the way you walk out the

gate, the way you wear your gear, how you carry your weapons, they instantly

perceive that and that’s the only information operations message that you

control as a small battalion in this big, wide, long war.”

ce thing I focused most on in predeployment preparations is NCO

training because, again, I think General McMaster said it: “cat’s where

it’s going to be won—corporals, sergeants, lieutenants.”cat’s where you

have to focus because that’s who is going to be way out there on the edge

of the empire, the pointy end of the spear, like we say. cose are the

Marines who are going to make those tough calls, and if they’re not

trained to deal with that type of decision making, if they don’t have the

requisite excellence in their weapons handling and their small unit tactics,

they’re not going to be able to do that job.

So, we ran a battalion in-house through the predeployment training

program. We called it the Leaders’ Course because there were some lance

corporals who were filling NCO billets that received the training as well.ce

bottom line was we wanted to control how Marines would be led in 1st

Battalion, 1st Marines.We didn’t have enough quotas for the great sergeants’

course or the division squad leaders’ course. You just couldn’t put them

through the pipeline fast enough, so we did it ourselves. Each company took

a block of instruction and it was basically a five-week course. I’m sure it

could have been better. But it was good enough and it focused on prep for

combat, how to give an order, how to prep a unit to get out the door and do

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
a mission, how to inspect them, how to do a post-mission critique and learn

from what you did right, what you did wrong. You’re teaching them the

skills that you are going to demand they use when they get out there in a

very challenging environment in Iraq.

We talked about language training. On my first deployment, Colonel

comas C. Greenwood1 got Defense Language Institute instructors from

Monterey, California, to come to the battalion. We had about a sixty-day

immersion course, thirty days in Camp Pendleton and then in the transPacific. When you’re on the ships, you’ve got nothing to do. We had about

one hundred Marines at that time in language training, and then, when we

got to Kuwait, the instructors went home, but we retained a fairly good

training base.

What I changed the second time I deployed as a battalion commander is

that I gave everybody the Defense Language Aptitude Battery, so we looked

for people who had the propensity to learn languages. And then, like General

McMaster said, I looked for people who just naturally had a gift of gab because

we wanted to add those talkers in every squad throughout the battalion.

And so, with those two elements, we picked 150 Marines. cey did

a ninety-day immersion course because I had the contacts with the

instructors from the previous deployment, brought them down to Camp

Pendleton, and that’s all these Marines did. cey were Marines who

already had a tour under their belt, so as far as going through the

predeployment training program, again, with a five-month turnaround,

I felt I could assume the risk of not putting them through it. I didn’t ask

anybody. And they didn’t do anything but study language.

I was amazed at how quickly some of them picked up conversational

Arabic. Could they write it? No. Could they read it? A little bit. But they

could speak it enough to where they could act on it on the street. Everybody

said this is a fight for information or intelligence. Well, if it is, you’ve got to

talk to people to gain it. If you talk to them in their own language, they are

much more receptive because they realize most Americans don’t speak

Arabic and they’re kind of impressed when you do. It’s one of those things

to build rapport, which is the first key to starting up a relationship, and

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Qe Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: A Discussion

1 Commanding Officer, 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit. 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, was the Ground

Combat Element of this expeditionary unit.
relationships mean everything in this culture. It really helped and I think it

paid significant dividends. If you can, train even more Marines and for

longer periods of time, because I think it is that important.

Cultural training was the same as every other unit. ce basic infantry

tactics, techniques, and procedures are important, but the tactics are not so

complex. ce decisions are complex, and that’s what you focus on. You use

your training always as a vehicle to put people—and test their decision

making—through tactical decision games all the time so that you can do this.

You had to spend a lot of time training on intelligence collection

because we don’t routinely do it at the squad, platoon, and even battalion

level. So, we looked at a process to do that. Here’s how I organized to solve

the problem, and I’ll only talk about H and S [Headquarters and Service]

Company—245 Marines: cooks, bakers, candlestick makers. I used them to

reinforce my main effort. I formed provisional security platoons out of the

company because most of its duties are life support for the battalion. But

when you live on Camp Fallujah, you don’t need any more life support.

You’ve got more life support there than at Camp Pendleton.

So, I put these guys out in the fight and they loved it. Every Marine’s a

rifleman, they’re doing fixed-site security so that my infantry Marines don’t

have to stand guard duty after an eight-hour patrol.cey can either do mission

prep or sleep, rest, do something else. It increased my ability to maneuver.

Rules of Engagement are a commander’s issue, and I taught it. Now,

the JAG [Judge Advocate General] was with me for any technical questions,

but Marines don’t like lawyers. cey don’t listen to them. And they don’t

want to be talked to by the guy who they think is a pencil-neck geek anyway.

Most of your Marines didn’t go to college. cey don’t understand lawyers,

and they don’t want to be told about a very critical part of their decisionmaking process—which is a law of armed conflict—by somebody they don’t

respect. cey want to hear from their commanding officer. And so that’s

why I taught it. We reset every time we pulled platoons out to give them a

shower and hot chow and retaught laws of armed conflict. And we went

over vignettes of what we had either done well or not so well while we were

executing the mission.

You have to remember that the hearts of your Marines will harden over

time. If you don’t understand that, you miss the point. cese guys are on

their third or fourth tours. cey’ve seen buddies get killed and blown up.

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
cey may have been blown up themselves and come back to duty. It’s hard

to tell them to like these people, but you have to talk to them about it in

relevance to the mission and how treating them well and using the law of

armed conflict benefits them as far as their legitimacy, as far as their ability

to execute the mission, and actually saves fellow Marines’ lives.

ce big thing about combat leadership is supervise, supervise, supervise.

You get out there. Once you’re in the fight, you have to get out of that

command post and go see every unit. I had, at one point, seven maneuver

companies, thirty platoons. It took a week to see everybody face-to-face.

When I talk about two levels down, I’m talking about looking the lieutenant

in the eye, having him brief you on what he’s doing. You know what he

should be doing because you’ve given him the order, but you’ve got to go out

there and see them actually do things.

ce kinetics are easy. We get that.ce nonkinetic civil affairs—PsyOps

[Psychological Operations]—information operations working with civilian

leaders, that’s the hard part. I’m not saying going to guns is not important—

and I think General McMaster said it well: “Don’t ever lose a firefight,

pursue every guy that’s shooting until you got them.” No one gets a free

shot, is what I used to say. I don’t care how far you’ve got to chase them.

Chase them, run them down, and kill them if they choose to oppose you.

But focus your efforts of your staff, the battalion, on the nonkinetic aspect

of the fight.

Partnership—you’ve got to eat, live, and sleep with them to be effective.

ce last point is if you remember nothing else, I would say—we all had

signs that said it—Complacency Kills. And I told my Marines that that’s

really not true because it’s the divine right of the PFC or lance corporal to

be complacent. cat’s his right. He gets to do that. After he has his first

firefight, he’s going to be complacent. He’s going to get comfortable in his

environment, and it’s his leadership that mitigates that natural phenomenon.

If his leadership isn’t caring, active, involved, he will be complacent and he

will get himself killed because you didn’t have the balls to do it right, get in

his face, jack him up, and make sure he did it right.

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Qe Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: A Discussion
Colonel William M. Jurney

ce employment concept of military forces is first and foremost based

on getting at the enemy. cat’s the perspective I come from in my battalion

view regarding lessons and experiences from Ramadi between 2006 and 2007.

With an offensive mindset and not a defensive one, you look for and go

after that which allows you to take and maintain the initiative against that

which opposes you. cere is no cookie-cutter solution or template for this.

All too often, I think, that’s what we see folks seeking, that there’s got to be

one set template approach. I would submit to you that that’s just not going

to be the case.

In counterinsurgency, however, you can expect the key terrain to be the

population. So the question comes up as to whether you should be

population focused or enemy focused. And I submit to you that the answer

is “yes.”You cannot look at one without understanding the full implications

to the other.

ce key thing that I said just now was “understanding,” which is much

different from assuming or misplacing your own Western bias onto the

actions or reactions of particular events in a given area of operations. Wide

variances can exist from one local area to the next. cerefore, you must

account for and understand the specific nuances for each local area or

community. From that point, you can already see that an effective tactical

concept of employment, by necessity, is going to come predominantly from

a bottom-up point of view.

In my framing of the population focus or enemy focus, I would submit

that the population is viewed more as a means to get at the enemy versus a

standalone end state. It’s not that civil-military operations or civic action

should not be aligned to meet the needs of the people. It’s just that they

have to be more closely aligned and prioritized by that which gives you the

greatest tactical advantage against the enemy first.

Often, I’ve seen civil-military actions that are not connected to either

the needs of the people or anything else that ties to improving a unit’s ability

to hurt the enemy.cat’s not meant to be a disparaging comment about our

civil affairs efforts, but rather at the decisions of commanders, because it is

a commander’s decision, it’s no different than ordering an attack.cis brings

me to my next point, which is that you cannot understand something that

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
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Qe Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: A Discussion

you do not live with, sleep with, and operate with every day and night.

Effective counterinsurgency operations in and around populated centers

require a permanent, persistent, credible security force. It cannot be part

time. You will not gain the level of understanding of the situation, or the

trust of the people, if you’re not there 24/7.

ce best security force is homegrown. It’s local. Some might think that

I’m simply advocating the last experience in Ramadi with the Awakening.2

Actually, no. ce Awakening was a growing movement that was making a

difference outside the city of Ramadi in late 2006. And although it helped in

providing new recruits for outside the city of Ramadi—which was a good

thing—this movement and its recruits were from surrounding rural areas, and

they would not operate within the city proper. cerefore, they were not the

ideal local type that you want, who knows the streets and knows the people.

Yes, at some point we hoped that a national identification of

governmental forces transcends a struggling country psyche, but near-term

counterinsurgency is not going to happen. Make no mistake, the best

security and sense of security for locals are local, and that local security force

will also know the area and its people in such a way that no level of cultural

understanding will ever bring.

A local security force is the enemy’s worst nightmare. If the enemy loses

his ability to hide in plain sight, then he loses his freedom of movement

and action. He also loses the ability to replenish his own ranks with new

recruits. So, you’re hurting the enemy and you’re meeting the essential needs

within your area of operations for employment; money; prestige; honor; and

even a sense of adventure for some by joining a legitimate government

security force, which also allows, culturally speaking, a desired venue to prove

yourself a man and a warrior.

Some will argue that a 24/7 combined action battalion concept for

partnering an entire battalion and its leadership with newly forming security

forces in the populated areas is simply too risky. I would not disagree more.

I submit there’s not only greater risk to the force but also an even greater risk

to successful accomplishment of the mission if you choose to operate from

some isolated, disconnected forward operating base while conducting

2 Beginning in 2006, the al-Anbar Awakening, or Sahawa al-Anbar, was a revolt of Sunni tribes against

al-Qaeda in the western Iraqi province of Anbar.
independent or intermittent partnered U.S. ops [operations] that lack

permanent presence and a connection to the people.

Last, I suggest that our tactical concepts of employment must pursue

multiple lines of effort concurrently if you’re going to take the initiative.

Kinetic and nonkinetic, regular and irregular, conventional and

nonconventional—you pick the moniker of the day. cere are many.

However, focusing on the enemy by only pursuing U.S. targeted raids, all

under the framework of “clear, hold, and build,”is not enough to truly be on

the offensive and take the initiative.cey’re essential and they’re viable ops.

But I would not suggest that such a narrow approach should be pursued.

I have seen time and again the limited activity of general purpose forces

waiting on the big one to emerge for that game-changing targeted raid, to

kill or capture an all important individual.cis single line of effort is simply

not going to work in gaining you the initiative, nor will it work for a unit

that simply follows a lockstep, sequential approach along the clear-holdbuild construct.

I suggest that in building or holding one might in fact clear the enemy

without a firefight. If so, then why would you limit yourself to only those

tools that we traditionally associate with conventional ops against a fixed

enemy force, especially when you can’t even find the enemy? cerefore, you

should cast your net wide along all viable lines of effort if they can help you

get at the enemy. Actions that you take should either directly or indirectly

lead to improving our ability to impose our will on the enemy.

Discussions of civil-military ops, key leader engagement, training and

employment of local security forces, restricting lines of movement,

population control measures, census taking, improving governance and

essential services, all are techniques and methods to be applied and/or

combined as a leader sees fit based on a continuous process that sees a tactical

advantage at taking up such actions. If not, then I submit that you’re likely

putting men and women at risk for nothing. Moreover, you could actually be

making your own situation worse by inadvertently disenfranchising the most

critical element of getting at the enemy: the population.

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
Colonel Julian Dale Alford

We three on the stage here have known each other as brothers for

literally twenty years. Our families, our friends, we’ve spent many, many

hours over the last twenty years drinking beer together and, on occasion,

sipping a glass of whiskey talking about this stuff. And what I just heard

over the last thirty minutes, I could say again over and over and expand on

each of those points because we literally know what each other think. And

that’s a unique thing about the Marine Corps that you need to understand.

I’ll address lessons from al-Qa’im and how they transfer to Afghanistan.

I had an opportunity to command a battalion in Afghanistan in 2004, came

home for seven months, went back to Iraq with the same battalion, literally

the same battalion: the same five company commanders and three XOs

[executive officers], that was a unique piece the 3d Battalion, 6th Marines,

were able to do. And then this past year I spent nine months in Afghanistan

working for a great soldier named General David McKiernan.

I will reiterate what Bill [ Jurney] said: is it population-centric versus

enemy-centric? Yes. Again, it’s both. You can look at al-Qa’im and say we

did Iron Fist—a battalion-size operation—and then a regimental-size

operation, Steel Curtain, to take back the area.

cat was a means to an end, though. As we moved and did that, we

literally dropped off platoons to build positions and at the end of a tenweek period, we had fourteen. And we immediately moved the Iraqi Army

in with us. I learned many of those things at the first tour in Afghanistan—

mistakes made—and was able to use that the next year in Iraq.

How does that transition to Afghanistan? What I see there—and I

had the opportunity to travel around the entire country, visit many, many

units including our NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization]

partners—is that we’re completely an enemy-centric force.

We need to reposition a significant portion of our forward operating

bases and combat outposts among the population because right now they’re

not. ce problem is that they were built for counterterrorism missions in

2002 to 2004; they are in the wrong locations for a population-centric

COIN [counterinsurgency] effort.

ce second thing is that although we talk and write about it a lot, we are

not focused on the Afghan Army, police, and border police.We don’t live with

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Qe Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: A Discussion
them as partnered units.We consider partnering as link-up and do operations.

If you’re not sleeping with them, eating with them, and crapping in the same

bucket, you’re not partnered, and we’re not partnered in Afghanistan.

Population-centric COIN is not about being nice to them, like Templer3

said. His “hearts and minds” gets confused sometimes. It’s about separating

the population from the insurgents, protecting them, influencing them, and

controlling the population, especially in the initial stages.We’ve talked already

about the enemy. It’s fluid. It hides in plain sight. ce enemy does it.

What do we mean by “hearts and minds?" I think Dr. Mansoor brought

up “trust and confidence.” I totally agree.ce heart or the trust is that we’re

in their best self-interests. We’re in their best self-interest. ce people have

to believe that, and in their mind or their confidence in us they have to

believe that we are going to win, and when I say “we,”it’s the Afghan Army

and police with our support and their government.cey have to believe that

we’re going to win and we’re going to protect them. In their heart they have

to believe we’re in their best self-interest, and in their mind they believe that

we are going to win. We’re failing to do that.

If you’re going to do population-centric COIN and you’re going to

live with the Afghan Army and police, how do you do that? ce very first

step is to understand who you’re dealing with. cis is based on my

understanding of the Afghan people from my seventeen–eighteen months

of experience in the country.

First, this is a quote I found and totally agree with: “cey’ve learned

to survive thirty years of war by hedging their bets.” cey’ve learned to

play both sides. And they are still doing it. Why? Because they’re getting

slapped on one cheek by their government and the other cheek by the

Taliban. cey don’t have a good choice, and we’re not providing them a

good choice because we’re not population-centric, we’re not among the

people, and we’re not with their army and police force.cat’s the first step.

I was pleased to see General McChrystal’s paper that he’s written about

it. Now we’ve got to execute it.

ce next thing is that these people can read you better than any people

I’ve ever been around, including my uncles who live in north Georgia, who

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

3 Sir Gerald Templer, British High Commissioner in Malaya between 1952 and 1954 and commander

of counterinsurgency efforts during the Malayan Emergency.
are very similar to them. cey live off the land. cey’ve learned over their

lifetime, in order to survive, how to read people. You’ve got to understand

that when you deal with them on a daily basis, if you’re not sincere, they

will see through you in a heartbeat and you will not be successful with them.

And the next point is about their problems.ceir problem is they don’t

have honor and justice in their government. cey believe their government

is corrupt. Whether it is or not, they believe that. And they don’t believe

they have physical security, and a significant portion of the population

doesn’t have food security four or five months out of the year. cose three

things, if we’re among the people and with their army, we can focus on those.

cis is an important list.

ce Afghans have based all their thoughts and decisions on history.

When an Afghan looks at life, he looks backwards. He thinks about his

history, he makes decisions off the oral history he knows of his society.

When we in the Western world look at life, we look forward. We think

about how we’re going to have a bigger house, better retirement, better car,

and send my kid to college to get a better education.

When you deal with an Afghan, he makes decisions looking at life 180

degrees from the way you look at life. It’s difficult for us to wrap our minds

around and understand that. We must try to understand this better.

It’s an agricultural-based society, which is extremely important, and

much of their agriculture was destroyed in the past.We must focus our effort

and our development to bring that back. But the first thing is we’ve got to

be there among them.

And then there is the rural versus city dichotomy—80 percent of the

population is a rural force. cey don’t want electricity in many of the

homes. We think they do. Why did Iraqis want electricity? Because they

had electricity. Many Afghans never had electricity. cey want electricity

to move water in their clinics and their schools, but in their homes, they’re

not begging for it, but we’re trying in many cases to give it to them. We

need to understand them better before we try to help them.

How do you get them to pick our side? cis whole thing is about getting

them to pick our side. Right now, they’re playing defense.cey’re on defense

because they’re not picking our side. cey don’t believe in their hearts that

we’re in their best self-interest, and in their minds they don’t know if we’re

going to win.

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Qe Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: A Discussion
ce Afghan culture is like the Iraqi culture on steroids. It’s a weird

mix between Pashtunwali and Islam, which in many cases are opposed to

each other. And the parts where the insurgency really is, the east and the

south—because this is a Pashtun insurgency, make no mistake about it—

Pashtunwali is extremely strong even though something similar to it exists

throughout the rest of the country. And it is a great code. It is very similar

to the code that my uncles in north Georgia live by.

Understanding the people and their culture—you need to do that

because that’s all they have. cat village elder who you deal with on a daily

basis, if you’re doing this business right, his honor and his culture and his

history are all he has in life and he will kill you for it.

With the Afghan Army, you’ve got to leverage a culture.ce leadership

we’ve already talked about. ce logistics of their force are weak and we had

to work on that. You’ve got to accept chaos when you deal with the Afghan

Army because it’s going to be there. You’ve got to show that you’re

committed and risked your life right beside them. If you don’t do that, they

will not fight with you.

ce army is an extremely credible force, especially at the company level

and below. At the battalion and above, they’re struggling, because they’re

trying to build the airplane while they fly it. And if we’re with them all the

time, which we’re not now, as a partnered force, we can make that a lot

better. Advisors and mentors are not enough.We have to evolve for that.We

have to start with a partnered force and evolve to mentors and advisors and

then work our way out of a job. We’ve got it backwards, I believe.

ce Afghan police—there’s got to be a local-based police, as Colonel

Jurney talked about—they must be from the local area and the people have

to know who they are. cat’s where the intelligence comes from and I

believe that we, as a general purpose force, have to live with the police force.

I can do some math for you really quickly. Let’s just say there are 360

districts. cere are 388 but we’ll say 360. I think an infantry battalion can

do about twelve districts, and we’ve got some examples of this down south

with the Marines in Delaram.cat means thirty battalions or ten brigades.

We’ve got to do some real math and tell some real truth about what it’s

going to take if we’re going to do a population-centric COIN, because

standing up the police is the most important thing we’re doing and right

now we’re not focused on it.

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
ce clusters in those districts, you’d be amazed at what happens when

the Marines or soldiers live with them. ce governor, the district governor

moves and puts his house right by the police station.ce district police chief

moves right by the police station and stays there 24/7. ce judge moves

there. He can move the district support teams out of PRTs [Provincial

Reconstruction Teams] into those areas. It becomes a cluster in those

districts and that’s where it matters in Afghanistan, down at the district

level. We’re failing to do that.

ce last piece is the Afghan Border Police, the forgotten soldiers.cey

are a paramilitary fighting force. If you want to get into a firefight in

Afghanistan, you partner with the Afghan Border Police. You’ll get all the

fighting you want. We’re not doing it. And we must change the way we’re

doing it and we must do some real math on what it’s going to take if we

want to make a viable, stable Afghan country that no longer harbors

terrorists. If that’s so, then there are some hard lessons, some hard decisions

that have to be made about what it’s going to take.

Bing West

Colonel Alford and Colonel Jurney just said that the Afghan population

doesn’t know if we’re going to win. cere is no more devastating statement

that could be made than that after we’ve been there for eight years.

As I listened, I went down the list of the recommendations versus what

we’re doing and it struck me between the eyes that the reason we’re not

doing any one of them is that risk aversion has now become so much part

of our culture that I’m not persuaded we can make the changes. ce risk

aversion obviously starts right at the top and permeates our entire society.

Are we willing to have the casualties that it takes to turn things around?

And the recommendations were, first, you need 24/7 patrolling in the

populated areas. Right now we average one patrol per platoon per day for six

out of the seven days. A platoon is about the smallest size that we’re sending

out with the MRAPs, etc., and we’re tied to them to have water. So, if you

do the math, we’re showing up in any of the populated places for about

thirty minutes a day. cere’s a big difference between being visible thirty

minutes a day and being invisible for the rest of the day.

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Qe Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: A Discussion
ce second point was everyone said you have to be unremitting and

finish the firefights. We’re not finishing any firefights.

ce third one was we need the Combined Action Program concept.

Colonel Jurney said that the local security forces are the enemy’s worst

nightmare, and they sure are. No battalion out there today is permitted to

go and recruit local forces the way we did in Vietnam and with the Sons of

Iraq. cis Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan

organization is a little bit batty, but it controls things and we’re doing

everything from the top down according to a certain schedule, but the

individual battalion isn’t allowed to go out and do what Colonels Jurney,

Alford, and Furness did so successfully in Iraq. I have seen combined action

platoons pulled out by brigade commanders because they are too risky, when

they had a platoon overnight somewhere, leaving the Embedded Training

Teams [ETTs] there with the Afghans, the exact opposite of what we

should be doing.

And finally, the notion of living with the Afghans, with the exception

of the ETTs, and the British Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams

and our advisor teams, that’s really just not being done today. So the gap

between what the battalion commanders recommend and what we’re doing

couldn’t be larger.

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond


Officer Development for Counterinsurgency

by Nathaniel C. Fick

My platoon deployed in August 2001 as part of Battalion Landing

Team, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, on what we expected to be a routine

western Pacific cruise. Piled high on the empty bunk in my stateroom were

surfboards, guitars, and golf clubs—all the tools we thought we’d need for

our six months in Asia and the Middle East.

Less than two years later, after serving in Afghanistan and Pakistan,

many of these same Marines joined in the initial invasion of Iraq. Two

incidents near Baghdad in the spring of 2003—barely eighteen months after

the 9/11 attacks—shaped my views on counterinsurgency (COIN)

leadership.

In early April, while on a mounted patrol in a small town, we had a

single rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) round fired past our lead vehicle. I

gave the order to do what I thought was tactically correct: dismount, sweep

through the small collection of buildings, and find our shooter. Within

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Chapter 7
minutes, we had rounded up the “military-age men” and lined them up

facedown in the dirt, found most of the women and children huddled

together in a single room, and concluded that whoever fired the RPG had

long since disappeared into the adjacent palm grove. As we drove out of the

village, I couldn’t help thinking we’d done more harm than good.

A few weeks later, in a different village outside Baghdad, we were

walking a foot patrol when I detected a hostility I hadn’t felt before.crough

an interpreter, I asked an Iraqi man what was wrong.

“Your sunglasses,” he replied.

I and most of the Marines wore dark glasses in the midday glare.

“What about them?” I asked, assuming that he was offended by the

inability to see our eyes.

“We think they are x-ray glasses and you are looking at our women.”

cis wasn’t the answer I’d expected, so I took off my glasses and slipped

them onto the Iraqi.

“Turn them on.”

Faced with this seemingly intractable problem, we all took off our glasses

and put them on the kids who invariably followed us around small towns. We

continued the patrol, and immediately noticed that goodwill had returned.

ce lesson, for me, was that these two events, each replicated thousands

of times over many years of war, led to very different places.

Mark Moyar, in A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the

Civil War to Iraq, identifies three schools of COIN thinking: enemy-centric,

population-centric, and what he calls leader-centric. My first example, of

sweeping through a village to find a shooter, is clearly enemy-centric, and

the second, of removing our glasses to assuage local concerns, is more

population-centric. cere’s actually a place for both, and the objective of

good leader-centric training is to create decision makers who can strike the

proper balance between fighting the enemy and protecting the people.

In seeking to define a good leader-centric process, Moyar lists ten

attributes of effective COIN leaders: initiative, flexibility, creativity,

judgment, empathy, charisma, sociability, dedication, integrity, and

organization. Compare his list to the fourteen Marine Corps Leadership

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
Traits, known by the mnemonic JJ DID TIE BUCKLE: justice, judgment,

dependability, initiative, decisiveness, tact, integrity, enthusiasm, bearing,

unselfishness, courage, knowledge, loyalty, and endurance.

cree are exactly the same: initiative, judgment, and integrity. Many of

the rest are fairly close in meaning: dedication versus endurance, tact versus

sociability. But there exists one glaring gap between them: where Moyar

highlights flexibility and creativity, the Marine Corps list makes no mention

of these attributes or anything like them.

cis is not to imply that the Marine Corps doesn’t value flexibility and

creativity. In previous generations, the Corps pioneered amphibious assault,

vertical envelopment, and combined-arms operations. But there is a

difference between a force that is creative and flexible in its doctrine, and a

force that recognizes, values, and rewards flexibility and creativity among

its junior leaders. In fact, it is the latter which makes the former possible.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has said,“In the end, the military

capabilities we need cannot be separated from the cultural traits and reward

structure of the institutions we have: the signals sent by what gets funded,

who gets promoted, what is taught in the academies and staff colleges, and

how we train.” His fiscal year 2010 budget proposal signaled the first major

move to “rebalance” the Department of Defense’s programs to enhance our

ability to fight today’s wars and to succeed in the operations we are most

likely to face in the years ahead, while also hedging against other risks and

contingencies. cis approach is similar to that of any tactical commander

who prepares for the enemy’s most likely course of action, while also hedging

against his most dangerous course of action.

Balancing risk must transcend weapon acquisition programs—

important as they are—and permeate the philosophy of training, educating,

and retaining military leaders. At least as important as developing a clear

vision of the capabilities of future enemies is developing an officer corps

capable of combating and adapting to the unforeseen enemy. We don’t have

the luxury of one known future, but must prepare for many possible futures.

cere will not be one type of future war; our enemies will continuously adapt

to avoid our surfaces and exploit our gaps. Leaders must therefore have the

agility to anticipate and rapidly react to a wide variety of situations. Instead

of training all officers for all reasonably foreseeable threats—perhaps a viable

strategy during the Cold War, but an impossible one in the threat

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Officer Development for Counterinsurgency
environment we face today—we must develop a cadre of officers capable of

adapting to situations for which they have not been trained and prepared,

while doing all that we can to prepare them for the most likely situation

they will face: persistent conflict by hybrid enemies employing asymmetrical

strategies and tactics.

cis does not require a major break with the past. ce basic principles

of combat—shoot, move, and communicate—and the bedrock principles

articulated in MCDP 1, Warfighting, still apply. But we may benefit from

examining several aspects of our officer accession and training process.

I graduated from a small liberal arts college in New England where

exposure to the military was fairly limited. I then went on to serve with

many service academy graduates, and had the opportunity to watch my sister

and brother-in-law work their way through the Naval Academy while I was

still on active duty. In my earliest days at ce Basic School (TBS), as a newly

commissioned second lieutenant, it seemed to me that the service academy

graduates had advantages that I would never match: they spoke the language

of the military, knew the rules of the strange game we were all playing, and

seemed to have friends everywhere. I, on the other hand, kept confusing

hatches with bulkheads.

But that playing field leveled very, very quickly. By the time we had

graduated from TBS, we were essentially peers. And by the time we’d spent

six months or a year in Fleet units, people’s reputations rose and fell

according to their abilities rather than their commissioning source.

In my experience, the training that really matters is what happens in

the operational units.cat’s where the culture is shaped, and that’s where the

most realistic and memorable training occurs. So, I’d like to focus on three

very simple concepts, getting back to my earlier assertion that the

fundamental tenets still apply, and that preparing for twenty-first-century

warfare does not require a break with all that’s come before: the three-block

war, the strategic corporal, and tactical ethics.

ce three-block war is an organizing construct that values adaptation,

that values training leaders with the mental agility to shift seamlessly from

combat in one city block to keeping an uneasy peace in a second block, to

providing humanitarian support in the third. Leaders must play by the right

rules in the right block, avoiding the sort of lax conduct that led to the

killing of a Marine on Failaka Island in 2002 (resulting in the inauguration

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of General James N. Mattis’s “guardian angel”concept), but also avoiding the

kind of amped-up overreactions that contributed to the killings in Haditha.

cis leads naturally to the idea of the strategic corporal, the notion that

a private in today’s military can have an impact far greater than a private in

Napoleon’s army. Indeed, the actions of an individual Marine or soldier can

have repercussions internationally. cis is a result of several trends:

increasingly lethal weapons, the emergence of a twenty-four-hour global

media, and the distribution of operations enabled by communications and

transportation technology (to such an extent that junior leaders are routinely

expected to act without orders). Recall the advice found hanging on a

company commander’s plywood door in southwest Baghdad: “In the

absence of orders or guidance, figure out what they should have been and

execute vigorously.”

If we as a military and as a nation are going to trust our strategic

corporals to execute vigorously, to do the right thing, and to be truly

empowered leaders making independent decisions on which much rides,

then we simply must better integrate our tactical ethics training into the

normal training of operational units. Our warrior culture must embrace the

same passionate intolerance for unlawful and immoral acts on the battlefield

that it currently has for leaving a comrade behind, and also embrace the fact

that our junior leaders have a continuous and never-ending duty to make

this so.

When young Americans join our ground forces—the Marine and Army

combat arms, and the Special Operations Forces—they seek to join what

General David H. Petraeus calls “the brotherhood of the close fight.”cey

want to be part of the pack. Most—and I know I was in this category—

have visions of glory and gunfights, not patience and proportionality. In the

heat of the fight, when people are dying, it can be tempting to dismiss

ethical considerations as a distant, and lesser, concern.cat is wrong. Sound

ethical conduct is absolutely essential to both mission accomplishment and

troop welfare.

Polls consistently show that the military is the most trusted institution

in American life—more than the police, the church, and even the Supreme

Court. Maintaining that trust is a sacred obligation that helps to ensure the

public support that our warriors need to accomplish the mission, to win.

Now, in terms of troop welfare, every war eventually ends, and then the

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Officer Development for Counterinsurgency
warriors revert to private citizens again. cey go on with their lives. ceir

leaders have a duty to do everything possible to ensure that they can look

their children and grandchildren in the eye, and at themselves in the mirror,

when talking about their service in wartime.

I’m one of those people now—a former junior officer leading a civilian

organization in a competitive industry and trying each day to adapt and stay

ahead and apply the lessons I learned in the Marines. I’d like to highlight

three of the lessons here, in the expectation that they apply more or less

equally in warfare and in business.

First, there’s a difference between legal authority and moral authority.

ce military is pretty simple in the sense that each member wears his

rank on his collar and his resume on his chest. When a new second

lieutenant checks into his first unit, that rank—the gold bar on his

collar—actually means something. cere’s all sorts of history and

institutional authority vested in it. cat formal authority, however, lasts

about five minutes in conversation, and about five seconds in a firefight.

What really matters is moral, or informal, authority. I saw moral authority

accrue to people who did two things: they were technically and tactically

proficient, and they genuinely cared for the welfare of the people in their

charge. Moral authority and rank aren’t necessarily correlated, and so

hierarchical organizations must have a feedback mechanism to allow the

views of junior people with high moral authority to be heard, both because

those views can improve the organization as a whole, and because those

individuals will tend to leave if they feel that their input isn’t having any

effect on the organization.

Second, diversity of experience matters. Modern warfare is a lot more

complicated than a bayonet charge, and leaders are more likely to recognize

problems and adapt quickly to meet them when they have been exposed to

a wide range of situations and have had to work with widely differing

groups.To that end, the military would benefit from more career on-ramps

and off-ramps, from sabbatical years for education or work experience in

other sectors, and even from increased lateral-entry options for people with

important skill sets. Such a shift in personnel policies would have two

beneficial effects: easing the recruitment and retention of more good people,

and increasing the quality of people across the force.

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cird, people must be allowed to fail. cey must be allowed to fail not

only to encourage them to be bold, and not only to allow them to learn, but

also—paradoxically—because allowing them to fail makes it easier for

commanders to fail them. I’m thinking specifically of relief. In today’s

military, relief of command is equivalent to public humiliation and the end

of an officer’s career. In the past—as recently as just before the war in

Vietnam—relief could simply be the recognition that a particular

commander was not the right person for this specific job at this particular

time. It was not unusual for commanders to be relieved of one command and

then to go on and perform at a high level in another assignment. By

equating relief with execution, our system has the perverse effect of keeping

the wrong people in the wrong jobs for too long. Modern warfare, with its

staggering array of tasks, demands a more flexible and resilient system.

Saint Augustine reminds us that the only purpose for war is to create

a better peace. In every phase of combat our leaders must constantly keep

that better peace in mind. We don’t have the luxury of one future, and so

must train for many possible futures.ce twenty-first-century officer must

be able to transition rapidly across the spectrum of operations—from

offense to defense to stability and support operations.cese may all occur

simultaneously, and the transition from one to the other will often be

made at the discretion of junior leaders—with huge ramifications for the

United States and our standing in the world.ce nation needs smart and

well-trained military leaders who can adapt to new circumstances while

remaining true to their bedrock principles—strategic corporals in the

three-block war.

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Officer Development for Counterinsurgency
84
Qe “Major" Challenge of Junior Officer Leadership

Development and Talent Management

by Paula D. Broadwell

Qe key to many of our successes in Iraq, in fact, has been leaders—especially young

leaders—who have risen to the occasion and taken on tasks for which they’d had

little or no training, and who have demonstrated enormous initiative, innovativeness, determination, and courage.

—General David H. Petraeus1

As Mark Moyar states in his book A Question of Command:

Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq,“Regardless of how brilliant

or dynamic the national and intermediate [counterinsurgency] leaders

are, they do not achieve success in counterinsurgency when their local [or

85

1 LtGen David H. Petraeus, USA, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in

Iraq,” Military Review, January–February 2006, 52.

Chapter 8
junior] commanders are devoid of leadership abilities.”2

Decentralization—the distribution and delegation of responsibilities to

lower-ranking individuals—is not a new phenomena on the battlefield.

As Moyar notes,“Decentralized command has, in fact, been the hallmark

of effective counterinsurgency since ancient times, except in the case

where insurgents meet large conventional forces.”3 ce acknowledged

prevalence since 9/11 of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations demands

a flattened battlefield hierarchy, and a particular emphasis on junior

officer leadership development. cis demand, however, is contrary to

existing military hierarchical authority and management principles.

Concurrently, most junior officers are not trained to assume or

understand the totality of needs and responsibilities at their level, nor do

they all have the experience to appropriately apply the tools if they did.

Additionally, many of their superiors are inherently risk averse and may

be leery about permitting a forward-based junior officer the leeway that

COIN may require. All of these conditions lead to this basic question: are

we employing junior officers in the best manner possible?

Given the increasingly decisive role that junior officers play on the

frontlines, U.S. Army leaders have placed renewed emphasis on reviewing

the allocation of tasks to this body of soldiers, as well as on examining the

quality and readiness of the force. In this chapter, I first examine the

allocation of tasks to junior officers and expand upon the benefits and pitfalls

of their crucible experiences. Second, I highlight critical talent retention

issues, illustrating the Army’s “quick-fix”approaches and exploring the root

causes behind the shortfall. Finally, I advocate for a stronger enterprise talent

management as a long-term approach to preserving the health and

effectiveness of the U.S. Army junior officer corps.

Allocating Leadership Tasks to Junior Officers

ce decentralized nature of the COIN fight demands that we give

maximum responsibility to the smallest units, according to battle-seasoned

officers of all ranks. Indeed, a brigade or battalion commander cannot

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

2 Mark Moyar, A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2009), 6.

3 Ibid., 5.
supervise every aspect of COIN. ce nature of today’s wars requires that

national and intermediate leaders provide clear intent and meaningful

guidance, and show trust in the most junior officers to prepare them to make

decisions and lead their units within effective frameworks.“No battalion in

this fight could succeed if junior officers could not be trusted with the most

difficult and sensitive of missions,” comments Major Chuck Rush.4

With this tall order, junior Army officer leaders need a new mix of

competencies to meet with personal success and to effectively prepare their

own subordinates for the contemporary operating environment and the

uncertainty that lies beyond. We must also adequately train and equip them

to operate in full-spectrum environments replete with kinetic threats and

nonkinetic enablers. ce confluence of the many uncertain variables

associated with the Army’s projected threat environment—globalization,

technological advances, demographic changes, urbanization, resource

demand, climate change and natural disasters, proliferation of weapons of

mass destruction, and failed or failing states—requires us to think deeply

and broadly in our leadership development programs.5 In doing so, we must

also acknowledge the distribution of skills that different officers bring to

the battlefield, and we must strive to ensure adequate junior officer

leadership development and talent management.

Unquestionably, our soldiers have faced diverse leadership tasks and

challenges since the inception of the armed forces. Indeed, the threats to

our national security have often changed, and so have the paradigms within

which our military organizes to train and prepare to meet the threats.

crough those lenses, there is nothing new under the sun. What has

changed is the breadth of tasks that we are asking our volunteer force to

accomplish—often without adequate training, education, or experience.

Pentathlete Officers

Fortunately, senior Army leaders are taking strides to cope with the

diversity of challenges inherent in COIN, peacekeeping, and stability

operations. In response to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army

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Qe “Major” Challenge of Junior Officer Leadership Development and Talent Management

4 Maj Chuck Rush, USA, email interview with author, 18 September 2009.

5 Draft of Chief of Staff of the Army white paper, received via email at Harvard University on 11 July

2007.
has expanded its normative leadership development vision to that of

developing multiskilled, adaptable, and flexible modern-day pentathletes.

ce pentathlete is a superb individual athlete who competes in very diverse

and demanding athletic events. Similarly, Army officers need to possess the

same breadth of talents for the military profession: unquestioned strength

in their Army core competency; professional adaptability and flexibility; and

expertise in nontraditional areas such as multicultural, interagency, and

intergovernmental settings. All these important characteristics are the goals

of the Army’s pentathlete vision.6

ce Army Chief of Staff ’s new vision reflects the leadership tasks that

our junior leaders have faced in the last eight years. First, the vision expects

the individual to be a competent warfighter—tactically, technically, and

technologically proficient.cese individuals must possess negotiation skills

and understand the nuances of serving as interlocutors for unsavory

characters when required by our rules of engagement (ROE) to protect these

characters, even when this is much to their disdain. On a micro level, the

leaders must possess strong interpersonal skills—such as empathy, charisma,

sociability—for building human relations and strong teams. cey must be

self-starters and initiative takers.

Junior officers must be managers of change in large organizations and

understand how their organization synergizes with the collective effort.cey

must possess cognitive skills in math and economics, and have the ability to

communicate persuasively in oral and written form.cey must possess broad

problem-solving frameworks that will brand them as strategic and creative

thinkers. We also expect them to self-develop language and cultural skills.

Further, they must be confident in their decision making (even if it is only

80 percent right) and competencies, and they must be willing to place duty,

honor, and country above themselves.

Crucible Experiences

Our junior officers engulfed in these myriad tasks in Iraq and

Afghanistan face both an opportunity and a test. ce environment is one

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

6 Col Jesse Farrington, USA, “Army Developing Strategic Leaders while Maintaining the Warfighting

Edge,” 30 March 2007, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA467210&Location=

U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf (1 November 2009).
of joint, combined, civil-military, multinational players. In this high-profile

arena, many of our junior leaders have faced a crucible experience—a test of

“place, time, or situation characterized by the confluence of powerful

intellectual, social, economic, or political forces.”7 ceir role on the frontline

provides the opportunity to influence global affairs and gain valued leadership

experience—skills invaluable to the military and to the private sector.

Concomitantly, this crucible experience is a test of their fortitude and

resilience. According to well-known leadership author Warren G. Bennis,

such an experience “is a defining moment that unleashes abilities, forces

crucial choices, and sharpens focus. It teaches a person who he or she is.”8

cese defining environments in Operation Iraqi Freedom and the

International Security Assistance Force are forcing our junior leaders to

confront the hard realities of complex situations—such as relatively

restrictive ROE, and the presence of innocents on the battlefield—with

their need to accomplish the mission. In a shift from the days of a lessprofessional conscript force, we hold our junior officers more accountable

for recognizing the strategic implications of their actions in a complex

moral environment. Indeed, their choices in “gray area” decision-making

dilemmas (e.g., treatment of detainees) can have global repercussions. As

one astute lieutenant in a 2007 War College survey conducted by retired

Army Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Wong at the Strategic Studies

Institute (SSI) noted, “ce fact is that we do not lower our standards and

we abide by a ROE; that we are not out there just to kill innocent civilians;

and that the mission is important, but the means to that end is sometimes

more important.”9 Such words speak volumes about how adept our junior

officers are becoming in dealing with the moral complexities in their post9/11 crucible experiences.

ce diversity of mental, physical, and psychological tasks that our junior

officers accomplish in the contemporary operating environment is immense.

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Qe “Major” Challenge of Junior Officer Leadership Development and Talent Management

7 American Heritage Dictionary quoted in Warren G. Bennis and Robert J.comas,Geeks & Geezers: How

Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), 14.

8 Bennis and comas, Geeks & Geezers, 16.

9 LtCol Leonard Wong, USA (Ret),“Developing Adaptive Leaders: ce Crucible Experience of

Operation Iraqi Freedom,” July 2004, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/

display.cfm?pubID=411 (accessed 15 September 2009). Special thanks to LtCol Wong and this study

for insights provided from junior officers.
Our future leaders must expect complexity and understand that they will

often have to operate autonomously, often without clear intent or guidance.

In this environment, they engage in tactical fights.cey support host-nation

community development missions. cey oversee the application of

Commander’s Emergency Response Program funds at will and run

controversial Psychological Operations missions. cey equip and train

foreign security forces that may wear flip-flops to work.cey negotiate with

local leaders in matters of great strategic political importance. cey are

diplomats and public spokespersons with the media.cey build universities

and manage sewage and utility stations.cey serve as “strategic lieutenants,”

placed in high-level Iraqi or Afghan host-nation ministerial offices, and

they are responsible for engaging with key indigenous leaders as liaisons for

U.S. commanding generals. Unquestionably, a twentysomething soldier can

and does influence world politics.

Faucet Phenomenon

Beyond these tasks, junior officers must wrestle with another

responsibility—the stress and strains of constant combat.ce psychological

aspects of COIN have presented junior officers with what many of them

call the faucet phenomenon: the necessity of adjusting to situations that

could change from cold to hot and back to cold instantaneously.10 In one

morning, a junior leader may be handing out pens and paper to Iraqi

children, and then have to face the moral dilemma of shooting a pregnant

woman who has voluntarily positioned herself as a human shield in front of

hidden insurgents. An officer on patrol with his troops may be immersed in

the horrific surrealism of thirty mutilated bodies dismembered by a vehicleborne improvised explosive device, then return to his base quarters to hang

out with friends and Skype with his children back home. He may be in a

high-adrenaline gunfight in one moment, then have to calm himself and

his troops to go knocking on doors in various neighborhoods to “win hearts

and minds” while seeking the gunfight’s instigators. cis is a remarkably

broad expectation of tactical, moral, ethical, and psychological duties for

officers with little frontline experience, and many with no training or

education in COIN.

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10 Ibid., 5.
An interesting paradox arises in this COIN environment. More junior

officers are gaining invaluable leadership experience on the frontlines. In

aggregate, we are developing a larger corps of seasoned officers. Many of

these individuals have illustrated their ability to adapt and overcome

professional challenges, especially those with prior world travel and out-ofthe-box formative experiences (such as study abroad during college or

civilian graduate school as a midcareer officer). However, when the SSI

study probed junior officers about their experiences, asking them if their

Iraq tour made them more proficient in their particular branch, most officers

(except for infantrymen) responded that they felt they were not gaining

proficiency. ceir experiences highlight a COIN paradox: gaining

experience but losing branch proficiencies. Tankers are dismounting (a

cardinal sin); artillerymen are patrolling the streets; and female cooks,

military police, or aviators are serving on “female engagement teams” in

direct support of combat units—and against Department of Defense (DoD)

combat exclusion policies. But in spite of the loss of technical skills or

circumvention of military policies, many respondents highlighted that they

were becoming better officers in general and better leaders specifically. ce

paradox, therefore, stems from the reality that while they are gaining

experience and building on a critical pillar of leader development, many

officers are losing branch-specific skills to the detriment of force

preparedness for a conventional or total-war scenario.

A quote from Mark Twain, musing in his book Life on the Mississippi,

sums up officers’task-oriented and psychological challenges precisely: “Two

things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a

[Mississippi River] pilot, a man has got to learn more than any one man

ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn it all over

again in a different way every 24 hours.”

While the adaptive “pentathlete officer”goal is the normative expectation,

there are inherent additional ramifications for the individual when we begin

to ask too much. Post-traumatic stress disorder has stricken some officers. In

addition, the Army soldier suicide rate was the highest in its history this year.

ce mental and emotional strains placed on some young leaders who see no

end in sight to our operations may question how much longer they and,

perhaps even more so, their families can pay the price of their separation.

According to a Pentagon survey in early 2009, “more than 40 percent of

military members are parents,” a higher percentage than ever before, and

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Qe “Major” Challenge of Junior Officer Leadership Development and Talent Management
“more than 230,000 children have parents serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.”11

Children invariably feel the strains of an absent, wounded, or deceased parent,

and so do spouses. In fact, according to DoD, divorce rates have increased

since 9/11 in both the Army and the Marines at a faster pace than our societal

rate. Although officers generally suffer at lower rates than enlisted soldiers in

these personal issues, they are not immune. ce confluence of these many

sociological and psychological challenges places great strains on the readiness

of our force and are a cause of retention problems.

Retention Issues

With these strains on our force so evident, it is no wonder that senior

military leaders are reflecting on our next course of action in this operating

environment. A recent Foreign Policy article titled “General Casey’s

Doubts”12 describes the Army’s highest ranking officer’s views on officer

retention and the rarely discussed strategic risks inherent in an Afghanistan

troop surge. According to the article, General George W. Casey Jr. fears that

the size and duration of this commitment could eventually break the allvolunteer Army. He is specifically concerned about junior officers.

Why is there a critical shortage of majors during a period of growth for

the Army, what is the cause, and how is the Army addressing the challenge?

ce Army Chief of Staff has openly acknowledged that we are already

at a critical juncture with the health of the junior officer corps. In fact, the

Army is about 15 percent short of its goal of 15,700 majors, as Figure 1

illustrates.

ce Army is no longer hemorrhaging junior officers, due in part to the

state of the economy and incentives such as the G.I. Bill. In the last year, the

lack of mid-career civilian jobs and levels of unemployment have served as

deterrents to jumping ship. However, the underlying bad news is that the

junior officer supply is only holding steady at a rate that is 15 to 20 percent

under required strength and there is no comprehensive Army strategy to

eliminate the shortfall.

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11 Robert Gates, “Joint Armed Forces Officers’ Wives’ Luncheon” (speech given by Secretary of

Defense, Bolling Air Force Base, MD, 26 June 2009). Available: http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/

speech.aspx?speechid=1364 (accessed 28 October 2009).

12 Robert Haddick, “General Casey’s Doubts,” Foreign Policy, 23 October 2009.
Quick Fixes to the Officer Shortage

A 2007 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) Retention

Report stated that the Army projects a shortage of 3,000 or more officers

annually through Fiscal Year 2013.14 To address the 20 percent shortcoming

in officer strength across the junior ranks, the Army has implemented a

zealous promotion rate for eligible lieutenants (from 60 percent in 1997 to

90 percent in 2008). Furthermore, 97 percent of eligible captains, and 95

percent of eligible majors will be promoted this year. All of these factors

have had a cascading effect on the overall force quality as young officers do

not have the time in key jobs to master their duties and responsibilities.

Needless to say, there is little culling going on within these ranks.

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Qe “Major” Challenge of Junior Officer Leadership Development and Talent Management

13 Col Casey Wardynski, Maj David S. Lyle, and LtCol Michael J. Colarusso (Ret), USA, “Towards

a U.S. Army Officer Corps Strategy for Success: A Proposed Human Capital Model Focused upon

Talent,” April 2009, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?PubID=912

(accessed 13 September 2009), 3.

14 For additional information, see the GAO report to the Committee on Armed Services, House of

Representatives, titled “Military Personnel: Strategic Plan Needed to Address Army’s Emerging

Officer Accession and Retention Challenges” (January 2007, GAO-07-224).

Figure 1. U.S. ARMY PERSONNEL REQUIREMENTS AND INVENTORY

Data are from the Total Army Personnel Database as of September 2007 and the Manning

Authorization Document as of September 2007. Chart extracted from the April 2009 SSI Report.13
In addition to these accelerated promotion rates, we have developed

another quick fix by shifting our recruitment pools percentages within the

traditional source pools. Below is a list of the shift in supply rates from the

three main sources: Officer Candidate School (OCS), Army Reserve Officer

Training Corps (ROTC), and the United States Military Academy

(USMA; also known as West Point).15

OCS serves as a pathway for enlisted soldiers to transition to the

officer corps and for college graduates to join the officer ranks. ce OCS

route was designed as a mechanism for rapid acquisition of officers in

response to mobilization requirements. Over the last decade, OCS grew

from providing 10 percent of commissioned cohort to more than 40

percent, and was the single largest source of commission in 2008, according

to Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA).

Army ROTC traditionally provides the bulk of new officers through its

two- to four-year scholarship programs. Candidates go through a

combination of military science training in conjunction with regular college

education at approximately 270 colleges across the United States. ROTC

provides each service with the flexibility to adjust the number of graduates

who are commissioned into either the Active or Reserve components each

year to meet changing manpower objectives. It has historically provided nearly

70 percent of the annual cohort, but there has been a steady decline since the

late 1990s. ROTC now provides around 42 percent or 2,100 officers annually,

according to the OEMA. In 2006, ROTC was nearly 6,000 candidates short

of its goal. ce Army has filled the lacuna with commissions from OCS.

ce shift in commissions from ROTC to OCS requires the Army to

reach deeper into its pool of seasoned sergeants to commission new officers.

ce consequence is that the quality of the share of OCS candidates is

decreasing, as evidenced by their scores on the Armed Forces Qualification

Test—a test that determines basic qualification for enlistment and predicts

future aptitude and career success. Put another way, in OEMA’s words, to

fill our ranks we are commissioning “officers with a reduced likelihood of

academic or occupational success” at a pace faster than ever before. Finally,

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15 A fourth source of commissions comes from direct commissions (DCs). DCs serve the professional

branches of the Army (the Army Medical Department, the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, and the

Army Chaplain Corps) and provide civilian-degreed leaders a means to receive a commission in their

career field. For commissioning sources, see http://www.goarmy.com/officer.
by granting commissions to senior NCOs who are already near their

retirement mark, the Army indeed gains a seasoned veteran but he or she

will remain on active duty at lower rates than all other commissioned

scholarship officers, so this ultimately does not help make up for the dearth

of high-quality officers.

ce USMA provides a congressionally mandated 20 percent of

commissions or approximately 950 candidates each year (of an applicant

pool of nearly 13,000). cese numbers have remained steady over the

decades, and thankfully, the quality selection pool (based on applicant

grade point average, leadership endeavors, athletic accomplishments, and

other factors) has not dropped in the post-9/11 years.

We need each of these programs to generate a quality force and

prepare for future threats. In the words of former USMA Superintendent

General Howard D. Graves, we must avoid the “mistake of trying to pit

the . . . officer sources against one another as if they were quarter-backs

competing for the starting position on the football team.To do so seriously

misunderstands why we have four sources . . . [designed] to meet separate

national needs, and make their own uniquely valuable contributions.”16

Officer manpower analysis experts are quick to advocate retention of all

sources for another reason: unlike the corporate sector, which responds to

market needs by acquiring personnel from a variety of sources, there is no

lateral entry into the Army because the develop-mental structure and

“industry-specific” training limit the ability of even a successful corporate

leader to assimilate quickly into the culture.

A third fix that the military has implemented consists of financial and

opportunity incentive programs for lieutenants and captains. For an

exchange of three additional years of service, USMA and ROTC cadets

receive the promise of graduate schooling, permanent change of station, or

branch choice. Presently, 25 percent of ROTC and 15 percent of USMA

cadets choose the graduate school option.17 Besides improving continuance

rates, this advanced civilian schooling will hopefully produce a bettereducated, broader-thinking officer corps.

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16 Gen Howard Graves, USMA Superintendent from 1991–96, remarks on “Why West Point?”

Available through USMA Public Affairs Office.

17 Author telephone interview with the Deputy Director of OEMA, 15 September 2009.
For Army majors commissioned before 1998, however, there are fewer

incentives available. In fact, according to a 2007 report by the GAO, the

Navy and Air Force pay about ten times the amount the Army pays in

retention-related incentives to equivalent ranks. As one Army major retorted

in a Military Review article,“A Navy lieutenant commander, the equivalent

of an Army major, commissioned in 1997 could have received $121,000 in

retention bonuses during his 12-year career; over that same time, an Army

infantry officer would receive zero additional pay.”18 For those majors who

have left active service, the Army is offering $10,000 bonus for a return to

duty, but it has not offered incentives for those majors who have remained

on active duty.

In summary, the quick fixes to officer retention—accelerating junior

officer promotion, manipulating the officer supply channels, and incentive

programs—only go so far in addressing the Chief of Staff of the Army’s

concerns. Exploring and addressing the root causes behind our manpower

issues are a better long-term strategy for preserving the quality of our

officer corps.

Root Causes of Understrength

Contrary to some popular discourse, the root causes of understrength

status are not exclusively associated with the strain from operations in Iraq

and Afghanistan. ce downward trend started in the late 1990s and has

precipitously fallen through to the present levels.cis is due in great part to

low continuation rates resulting from prosperous civilian opportunities,

abundant nonmilitary funding and grants for college, and post–Cold War

military downsizing in the “dot.com”90s. In fact, Army majors debating on

the Army Intermediate Level Education (Combined Arms College) blogs

are quick to note that many factors influence their decisions to leave. While

some confess that fulfilling civilian alternatives or the promise of higher

compensation are motivation to leave, the following overarching themes are

much more prevalent.

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18 Maj Myles Caggins, USA, “A Major Problem: Cent-sible Solutions for the Army’s Major-Retention

Dilemma,” Armed Forces Journal, December 2008, http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2008/12/

3801581 (accessed 18 September 2009).
• Majors are usually at the age where they are starting or raising a

family, and now more than ever, competing with their spouse for

career prioritization and equal responsibility for domestic

responsibilities. As mentioned above, repeat deployments have caused

major strains in this regard.

• Many majors feel a communications gap between them and senior

leaders. cis problem might be remedied by improved mentoring.

Because the battlefield is flatter and leadership is extraordinarily

decentralized in the contemporary operating environment,

communication between senior and intermediate leaders and their junior

officers is mission essential. Genuine encouragement and empowerment

of subordinates, according to many junior officers, are more important

and yield higher return on investment than a pay incentive.

• A significant number of individuals feel their skills are under or poorly

utilized, and this degrades the value of their undergraduate education

as well as the niche skills and knowledge gained through civilian

schooling or self-development. cis stems in part from an

anachronistic officer talent management framework in which we

default to match “faces to spaces” and fail to associate talents and

competencies with the needs of the Army.

• Our promotion system is frustrating to many officers. To rise in the

ranks in the Army, one is required to pursue certain developmental job

assignments. However, there are only 1,000 developmental O-4 jobs

available, and about 15,000 majors competing for these slots. Without

checking these blocks, the probability of promotion to O-6 and beyond

is miniscule. While the Army officer rank structure is pyramidal in

shape, this type of promotion system does not guarantee that the best

and brightest rise to the highest ranks. Junior officers are cognizant of

this shortfall and feel that the current system often penalizes

individuals for trying to match their own skills and desires with the

needs on the battlefield in the interest of national security objectives.

ce convergence of the downsizing of our force two decades ago, the

perceived and real social and psychological grievances (money, sex, job

satisfaction, and support), the promising civilian alternatives, and the strains

of combat is potentially leading us into a pending “major crisis,” as one

junior officer punned. Perhaps some of the complaints are typical of junior

individuals, but if we consider General Casey and others’ fears of a shallow,

if not hollow, Army, all of these issues warrant further consideration.

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

Talent Management is the Key

One solution for improving the effectiveness of our soldiers in the

short-term and the quality of our force in the long-term is to develop a

comprehensive military personnel talent management system that goes

beyond the faces-to-spaces approach.Talent management is a mindset that

goes beyond rhetoric and toward a holistic and integrated approach to

leveraging the greatest competitive advantage from people.19 It will include

special strategies to recruit, retain, and develop its pool of top talent. It is a

key to leveraging a competitive advantage in peace and war.

ce April 2009 SSI report put it this way:

ce U.S. Army’s capacity to match officer talents to emerging challenges

is antiquated. Its legacy personnel management tools were designed to

align faces and spaces rather than talents and competency requirements.

Today, the Army cannot fully employ talent it expends great resources to

access, retain, and develop, nor does it articulate its talent requirements to

officers so that they can structure their development in consonance with

Army needs.20

In response to the call for improved talent management, a social

networking Web 2.0 technology pilot program is underfoot in the Army

Engineer branch. It attempts to allow officers to proactively list on an

Internet profile page (similar to Facebook) their unique skill sets or hobbies

that may be of use to the military. In contrast, Army officer records are

limited to information such as source of commission and education data,

awards, and training. Because of this limited available information for

branch managers or commanders in the field, our organizational capacity to

adapt or link the right person at the right place at the right time is impaired.

ce 2009 SSI report advocating for this talent management program

provides a useful example to illustrate the point of the Web 2.0 approach:

ce U.S. Army has been called upon to assume broad responsibility for

reconstruction operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans. Efforts

to adapt to these new missions have generated considerable demand for

19 Kevin D. Stringer, “ce War on Terror and the War for Officer Talent: Linked Challenges for the

U.S. Army,” ce Land Warfare Papers, no. 67 (July 2008), http://www.ausa.org/Site Collection

Documents/ILW%20Web-ExclusivePubs/Land%20Warfare%20Papers/LWP67.pdf (accessed 10

September 2009).

20 Wardynski et al., “Officer Corps Strategy,” 37.
officers who are professionally certified to guide structural, hydraulic,

geological, transportation, power distribution, and other engineering

projects. For example, while the Army carries hundreds of engineer

officers on its ledgers, many of them lack the specific competencies

required to conceive, plan, or execute reconstruction projects. Conversely,

many engineer officers do possess these competencies, but as they stem

from developmental experiences outside of those recorded within the

current personnel information set, the Army does not “know” who or

where they are in time of need.21

ce talent management programs could help to improve efforts outside

of the military ranks. Other services face this challenge as well. ce same

talent mismatch often exists in interagency task forces, command staffs,

deployed units, and even among our multinational coalition efforts. Nor is

the private sector immune to mismatching skills with organizational needs;

talent management is a key “doctor’s fix” for world-renowned management

consulting firms such as McKinsey. Employing talent properly—whatever

the service or organization—requires providing new challenges for

promising officers, providing quality feedback and coaching, and weeding

out poor performers. Right now, the Army is not fulfilling its mission in

these regards. As the 2007 GAO report portends, “Without such a plan,

the Army’s ability to meet future mission requirements and achieve its

transformation initiatives is uncertain.”22

8e Key

Military leaders wisely acknowledge the talent management—

recruitment, training, retention, and employment—issues that we face today.

cere remain many existing challenges associated with the contemporary

operating environment and overall force readiness, but the Army has proven

its resiliency, and this era will hopefully be no different.

As illustrated, COIN and full-spectrum operations require that we

invest great authority, responsibility, and resources at the lowest operational

ranks.ce challenge this presents to existing military hierarchical authority

and management principles is exemplified at many levels: junior officers are

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21 Wardynski et al., “Officer Corps Strategy,” 36.

22 GAO, “Military Personnel,” 7.
not fully trained to understand the totality of needs and responsibilities at

their level, and their superiors are often inherently risk averse and unwilling

or unused to delegating so much authority to the lowest levels. Fortunately,

the troop-to-task oversight is changing.ce experiences junior officers have

gained in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Army’s potential shift in talent

management foretell a step in the right direction.

Additionally, militaries at war will invariably face personnel challenges,

but history has shown that the U.S. armed forces have usually overcome

manpower issues—albeit with a few growing pains along the way.

Fortunately, Army leaders have taken many interim steps to preclude the

onset of a hollow force, but our leaders can do more. First, better

understanding of the evolving requirements and unique distribution of skills

among junior officers serving on the frontline will help us to focus our

recruitment efforts on individuals who are willing and capable of meeting

our force needs. Second, understanding the root causes that lead to retention

issues will help us to do a better job of preparing junior officers for the

challenges, providing them with rank-appropriate rewards and incentives,

and preventing the Army from losing the best of our corps to the private

sector. Finally, a comprehensive talent management program will benefit

both the officer corps and the Army. Putting the right person in the right

place is tantamount to keeping the best and brightest on our team. As a

recent study precisely concludes,“Talent management is a means to an end,

not an end in itself. An officer strategy focused upon talent has but one

purpose: to help the Army achieve its overall objectives.”23 Talent

management—especially of the next generation of leaders—is the key.

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23 Col Casey Wardynski, Maj David S. Lyle, and LtCol Michael J. Colarusso (Ret), USA, “Talent:

Implications For A U.S. Army Officer Corps Strategy” (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute,

November 2009), vi.


Generalship and Counterinsurgency

by Qomas E. Ricks

When I was a teenager, I went to Afghanistan, where my father was

teaching at Kabul University. He really enjoyed the Afghan people. I asked

him one day, “What do you like so much about the Afghans?” And he said,

“Oh, they’re like the people I grew up with in rural Wyoming.”cese were

the grandsons of pioneers. He knew a guy who had been brought in by the

cattlemen to kill off the sheepmen and liked the valley so much that he

stayed. “Basically,” he said, “Afghans are Clint Eastwood with a turban.”

By coincidence, I had the radio on when I was writing this, and a

Leonard Cohen song came on: “Everybody Knows.” It forced me to toss

out what I was writing because I realized it was just a sermon on agility and

adaptability, and everybody in this room knows that’s what you need in a

counterinsurgency (COIN)—creativity, flexibility, agility, and adaptability.

So the question I was thinking about more—the question that

Leonard Cohen forced me to think about is this: What are the barriers

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Chapter 9
for that? Why don’t we have more of that? Why don’t we have more of

those people who can think self-critically, who can recognize situations

in which the training and tools the military has given them are not

adequate to the job and are able to find new and different tools?

I think especially at senior levels, this has been a problem. We’ve seen

adaptive tactical and operational leaders. But what you also need is the leader

who can recognize the absence of a decent strategy, which has plagued us

both in Iraq and Afghanistan for several years. When you have a military

that is tactically proficient without an adequate strategy to guide it, you

effectively are riding at high speeds in a Ferrari without a steering wheel, and

that’s what we have been doing—that’s what we did in Iraq for several years

and what in many ways we are still doing in Afghanistan

I think in the current system we get adaptive senior leadership almost

by mistake. You get a J. D. Alford, you get an H. R. McMaster surfacing. It’s

frequently ignored. If it is noticed, it’s treated as a unique situation: “Oh,

you can do that up in northwest Iraq, but you can’t do that down here in

Baghdad. It’s a much different situation.” I think there’s no accident, by the

way, that the first effective, sustained COIN campaigns in Iraq took place

very far from Baghdad.

I also developed a COIN theory based on the old Johnny Cash song

“A Boy Named Sue.” If you really want an effective COIN leader, give

him a first name like Julian or Herbert. Now, you may ask David—David

Petraeus is not a weird name—but remember his high school nickname

was Peaches—maybe that makes a good COIN leader.

So, what are the systemic barriers to this sort of adaptive, self-critical

leadership? I think Paul Yingling offered some very good answers in his

famous essay that ran in Armed Forces Journal.cis is the book I’m currently

working on, a history of American generalship from World War II to the

present—the working title is From George C. Marshall to Tommy R. Franks:

What Up with Qat?

ce George C. Marshall model of generalship worked in World War II.

It didn’t look for agility, adaptability, or flexibility; it assumed it, because you

are either successful, dead, or relieved within two months. But we no longer

relieve people, so we’ve wound up with a general officer class, especially in

the Army, that is full of Marshallesque, hard-charging, energetic conformists.

cey are well trained, but not necessarily well educated in the art of war.

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I think the major reason for this is also Army-specific. ce Army had

this great training revolution in the 1980s when it regained tactical

proficiency, especially with the training centers. But in the process of that,

places like the National Training Center became the measure of an officer.

I think the Army, to a surprising degree, confused battalion command with

generalship. So you have people like Tommy Franks, being the best example,

who really thought that strategy was a job that someone on staff did for you.

I would see that as akin to having a general who thinks that somebody else

should issue orders for him.

Clausewitz tells us that the supreme and sole task of the senior leader

is to understand the nature of the conflict in which he or she is engaged

and adjust to it.Tommy Franks did not.Tommy Franks thought that taking

the enemy capital was how you won a war. cis is a little bit like Major

General George B. McClellan going after Richmond in the Civil War.

Franks thought that taking Kabul and pushing al-Qaeda into Pakistan was

a strategic victory. Why anybody thought that pushing al-Qaeda from

Afghanistan into a bigger country that had nuclear weapons was a good

idea is beyond me.

cen, he goes to Iraq and does the same thing. Let’s go to Baghdad and

then spike the ball at the fifty-yard line. I think Franks went zero for two.

And the question is this: why that guy rose to four stars and was allowed to

lead two wars? I would say a system that produces a Tommy Franks is not

a system that is producing adaptive, agile, and creative leaders. So how do

you change the system?

First, I think you restore accountability. ce Marines have less of a

problem with this than the Army does, I think, because the Marines come out

of a maritime tradition, and if there’s one thing the Navy is good at, it is

relieving skippers who ground their ships. You need accountability. You need

to know what success looks like. You need to know what failure looks like.

In Iraq, for several years, and in Afghanistan perhaps still, we did not

know what a successful tour of duty really looked like. For several years,

there seemed to be no relationship between performance in Iraq and

subsequent promotions. In fact, going back to the discussion of risk

aversion, the commander in Iraq who played it careful during a one-year

tour probably fared better in promotions than the risk-taker, which is not

what you want in wartime. You don’t want recklessness, but you want

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calculated risk taking. You certainly do not want a commander who keeps

his head down, plays for a tie, and tries to get out of Dodge with that

Bronze Star and a successful tour-of-duty report.

Back in 2005, Kalev “Gunner” Sepp and Colonel, now Brigadier

General-to-be, Bill Hix did a study of battalion, brigade, and regimental

commanders in Iraq and how successful they were in implementing COIN

doctrine. ce conclusion of the Sepp-Hix report was that one-third of

commanders got it, one-third were trying to get it but weren’t really, and

one-third didn’t get it and didn’t want to get it. cat means in late 2005,

two-thirds of our force in Iraq was ineffective and perhaps

counterproductive.

So, I think for accountability, relief is a neglected tool. I think actually

even Petraeus and General Raymond T. Odierno in command in Iraq

shied away from this. I was told that when a unit was ineffective in

COIN, they’d find something else for it to do rather than make it more

effective, especially if it only had a couple of months left in the tour. It

was just too late, it took too much energy, let’s just move them over to the

corner and do something else with them.

Relief used to be very common in the U.S. Army. During World War

II, seventeen division commanders and at least four corps commanders were

relieved. But relief also did not carry the weight it does today. You could

relieve an officer without killing his career.

For example, Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen, commander of the

Big Red One—the 1st Infantry Division—in central Sicily during the

summer of 1943 won the first battle that American forces fought against

Germans on European soil. For his efforts, at the end of the battle, he and

his assistant division commander, Teddy Roosevelt Jr., were relieved. Yet a

year later, Terry de la Mesa Allen was commanding another division—the

104th—across northern France, and he did a very good job. Another

assistant division commander, Brigadier General Sam Williams, was not

only relieved but was demoted, stayed in the Army, and retired later as a

three star.

So I think relief can be seen differently as a management tool, not just

as basically putting a gun to a guy’s head and killing his career. I don’t think

you do anyone a favor, especially that person’s subordinates, by keeping him

in a job he shouldn’t have.

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ce final systemic change, I think, you need in COIN leadership is unity

of command. cis is edict one according to French military officer and

scholar David Galula. We have never had unity of command in Iraq or

Afghanistan. I would like to see a proconsul. I would like to see somebody

in charge of the national effort, not only because Galula says you should

have somebody in charge of the national effort, but also because he says it

is essential to have a civilian in charge of the national effort as, ultimately,

all questions are going to be political and have to be judged and measured

in political terms.

We’ve had civilian authority and military authority in Iraq frequently at

odds. cis is not just a problem of civilians. I actually think that L. Paul

Bremer tried to carry out the national command authority’s wishes to

revolutionize Iraq and to transform it into a beacon of democracy that would

transform the Middle East. ce U.S. military rightly assessed that mission

to be insane, and so the military shirked the duty of carrying it out and said,

“No, we do stability.” cis has often put the military authority and the

civilian authority in disagreement.You can paper this over with handshakes,

or you can really have people resolve to work together as Petraeus and

Crocker did, but I think until you have a real unity of effort at the top, you’re

always going to be having a jerry-rigged effort.

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Winning in Afghanistan

by Lieutenant General David W. Barno, USA (Retired),

and Colonel John K. Wood, USA (Retired)

ce extended White House debate following General Stanley A.

McChrystal’s August 2009 assessment and the problematic outcome of the

recent Afghan presidential election have injected fresh uncertainty into

prospects for success in the eight-year international project in Afghanistan.

ce recent “temporary” withdrawal of nearly 600 United Nations (UN)

international staff following a lethal attack on a UN guesthouse in Kabul has

only compounded that uncertainty. Will the international community stay

the course? Will rising popular frustration in allied capitals in Europe and

North America result in the evaporation of the North Atlantic Treaty

Organization’s (NATO’s) popular support for more fighting—or for nationbuilding in a combat zone? Will the ineptitude and blatant corruption

evident at every level of the Afghan regime not only fatally sour

international backing, but also dissolve any degree of trust and legitimacy

between the Afghan people and their newly elected government?

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Rising skepticism concerning American and allied intentions have

helped fuel the resurgence of the Taliban and created political and

military space for its expansion. When coupled with an Afghan’s longstanding intolerance of foreign troops, our recent history of

abandonment—whether real or perceived—accelerates the Afghans’

impatience and makes our diplomatic, political, and military efforts much

more challenging. Regardless of the tactics chosen to pursue the

American objectives in Afghanistan and the region, clearly establishing

through words and deeds that the United States is and will be a reliable

long-term partner is essential and should form the basis of any strategy.

Countering the Taliban, assisting the Afghans’ efforts to restore

legitimacy to their government, developing and maintaining civilian and

military unity of effort, and reframing the public narrative on

Afghanistan can only be built upon the Afghan’s trust in the willingness

of the United States to remain engaged for the long term.

Defining Core Goals

Any discussion of reversing the downward trajectory in Afghanistan

must start with a discussion of objectives.What is “winning”? Can we “win”?

Winning for the United States in this context equates to achieving

American policy objectives in Afghanistan and in the region. cose

objectives are currently under review in Washington as part of the overall

reappraisal of the U.S. effort following the McChrystal assessment. In his

landmark 27 March speech outlining U.S. goals at the outset of his

presidency, President Barack H. Obama depicted those goals as follows:

And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban—or allows al-Qaeda to

go unchallenged—that country will again be a base for terrorists who want

to kill as many of our people as they possibly can. . . . For the Afghan people,

a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance,

international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human

rights to the Afghan people—especially women and girls. ce return in

force of al-Qaeda terrorists who would accompany the core Taliban

leadership would cast Afghanistan under the shadow of perpetual violence.1

1 Barack H. Obama, “Remarks by the President on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan”

(speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Washington, DC, 27 March 2009).
His white paper accompanying the speech outlined a core goal of

disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al-Qaeda and its safe havens in

Pakistan, and preventing their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Our characterization of the strategic goals for the United States argues

for a broader regional perspective and comprises the following points:

• ce Taliban and al-Qaeda defeated in the region and denied usable

sanctuary, and further attacks on the United States or allies precluded;

• Pakistan stabilized as a long-term partner that is economically viable,

friendly to the United States, no longer an active base for

international terrorism, and in control of its nuclear weapons;

• ce NATO alliance preserved with its role in Afghanistan recast into

a politically sustainable set of objectives;

• ce Afghan government stabilized as a legitimate state in the eyes of

the Afghan people, capable of exercising effective governance and

control of its territory;

• Regional states confident of U.S. staying power and commitment as

their partner in the multifaceted regional struggle against violent

extremism; and

• ce United States’ regional circle of friends expanded, and the

influence of enemies (e.g., violent extremists) diminished.

cese goals are derived from a long-term perspective of U.S. strategic

interests in the region, and are oriented toward a positive set of objectives

leading in the direction of long-term regional stability.ce potential threat

emanating from regional instability in a part of the world where two heavily

armed nuclear powers are locked in a perpetual cold war should drive us

toward a goal more broadly focused than simply quashing al-Qaeda. ce

remainder of this paper, however, focuses on the immediate challenge before

us in Afghanistan.

8e Situation in Afghanistan

Four main factors define the current situation. First and foremost is the

persistent, resilient, and adaptive insurgency that capitalizes on the fear and

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uncertainty about the future of the Afghan people. cis insurgency is

strengthened by the weakness and corruption of the Afghan government,

and it strives to outlast the diverse international efforts arrayed against it:

“ce Americans have all the wristwatches, but the Taliban have all the time.”

Second, a growing crisis of confidence among the Afghan people is fed by

a lack of trust in their government and persistent fears of abandonment by

the United States and the international community. ce third factor is a

continued lack of unity of effort by international military and civilian efforts.

Integration of efforts is largely nonexistent, and even coordination has been

strikingly limited. Lack of results on the ground reinforces this harsh

judgment. Finally, the vision for success in Afghanistan—the endgame—is

unclear to both the international and Afghan publics. Lack of clearly

defined aims creates confusion among Americans, our allies, and the Afghan

people, and bolsters the Taliban’s confidence that the insurgency can and

will prevail. Put simply, if we succeed—what will the next day look like?

Have we aligned our leadership, resources, and strategy to deliver the best

outcome? In sum, these four factors threaten to jeopardize our entire

enterprise in Afghanistan. ce battle for Afghanistan is winnable, but will

demand all of the resolve that both the Afghan people and the international

community can muster in order to succeed.

Four Major Challenges

1. Defeat the Taliban Strategy

Put simply, the Taliban leadership’s strategy is to “run out the clock”

on international involvement in Afghanistan.ce leaders of the Taliban

are convinced that they are winning, that they have the initiative, and

that they can succeed by being the “last man standing”in Afghanistan on

the day after all outsiders depart. History is on their side. Policy debates

at home which question our purpose and resolve in Afghanistan—and

which constantly talk about exit options—reinforce the Taliban’s

confidence in the correctness of their strategy. We must defeat this

strategy by declaring an end state that centers on a long-term U.S. and

international presence focused on assuring regional stability—using

diplomatic, economic, and military tools (robust security assistance

combined with limited kinetic operations).

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As stated succinctly in the recent U.S. counterinsurgency (COIN) manual,

“Tactical success guarantees nothing.”2 Defeating the Taliban strategy requires

more than simple attrition warfare or remote-controlled missile strikes. While

the Taliban wants to sap the will of the international community, increasing

violence against the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the

Afghan forces is also intended to increase the level of intimidation and

uncertainty among the Afghan population. A population-centric COIN

strategy recognizes the Taliban’s intent, and strives to separate the insurgents

from the population and increase the human security dimension—personal

security, health and education, access to resources, governance, and economic

opportunity. A population-centric approach aims to transform the

environment and deny the Taliban the opportunity to erode the population’s

sense of well-being in the societal, governmental, and economic spheres of

national activity. cis requires significant nonmilitary resources, persistence,

and patience. Success also requires a strong and lasting demonstration of

resolve in the face of casualties and other significant setbacks.

ISAF should prioritize the allocation of military forces to counter the

Taliban’s strategic targeting of Kandahar City, Khowst Province, and other

population and transportation centers. Focusing deployments of ISAF and the

Afghan National Army to key population centers—including key areas in the

north and west—while accepting tactical risks in less populated or geographically

isolated areas, will help restore security among the people and work toward closing

the trust deficit.ce prioritization must be done in close coordination with United

Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), the Government of the

Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and the aid community. Military power alone,

regardless of the size of the force deployed, will not defeat the Taliban. Only a

well-coordinated and well-targeted campaign of expanded security, governance,

rule of law, and economic opportunity built around controlling the major

population centers and restoring hope and optimism among the people will

succeed in defeating the Taliban. Success requires that the Afghan people have

confidence in their personal security, health and education, access to resources,

governance, and economic future—a broad human security portfolio.ce Afghan

people, down to the local level, are the ultimate arbiters of success in Afghanistan.

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2 U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency, Army Field Manual 3-24/Marine Corps

Warfighting Publication 3-33.5 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army and Marine Corps

Combat Development Command, 2006), 1-28.
Convincing these ultimate arbiters—the Afghan people—and defeating

the Taliban’s strategy requires an effective communications strategy. ce

difficulty of persuading local populations and communicating effective

messages of strength and resolve in a foreign culture cannot be overstated.

An effective communications strategy can only be delivered by Afghans

themselves—and must be underwritten by coalition deeds and acceptable

behavior, not just hollow rhetoric. Actions inevitably speak louder than

talking points. ce most powerful message is the conduct of the various

actors on the ground: U.S., Afghan, and Coalition security forces; the

Afghan government; and the various governmental and nongovernmental

development and reconstruction agencies. As the perceived legitimacy of

the Afghan government has diminished, successful execution of an Afghanled communications campaign has become increasingly difficult. It is

therefore equally important that we assist the next Afghan government in

efforts to rebuild the trust and confidence of the Afghan people toward their

own institutions.

2. Assist the Next Afghan Government to Rebuild Trust and Confidence

with the Afghan People

ce people of Afghanistan have lost much of their trust and

confidence in the current Afghan government. We must focus our

diplomatic and assistance efforts in Kabul on reforming the “next”

government to better meet the people’s expectations, with special

emphasis on anticorruption measures. In local areas across Afghanistan—

in the provinces and districts—we must work hand-in-hand with local

Afghan government structures to build capacity and to help them deliver

results that people can feel. If the international community is seen by the

Afghan people to be blithely supporting a new government that is every

bit as corrupt as the current one, our efforts will lack legitimacy there and

at home. Internally, reestablishing the legitimacy of the government helps

repair the trust deficit opened over the last several years of accelerating

corruption. Externally, a credible central government is essential to

maintaining the commitment of western allies and partners.

Reestablishing popular trust and confidence in the central government,

although remote from many Afghans, will provide a powerful

counterstroke to the insurgency.

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
ce recurrent debate between strengthening the central government

versus strengthening capacity at the local level must be ended. Afghanistan

requires a capable national government in Kabul and workable, legitimate

local institutions at the provincial, district, and village levels. Models for

such a structure exist in Afghan history over the centuries, most recently in

the 1960s and early 1970s. Action in this realm must be two-pronged: Kabul

and the central government serving as the top-down focus of the Kabulbased international community; and provincial and district-levels serving

as the bottom-up focus, enabled (and primarily led) by military efforts.

Military civil affairs units joined by a select number of appropriately

trained and equipped civilian volunteers, with adequate legal authorities,

should focus on improving the accountability and performance of Afghan

provincial and district governance, catalyzing economic development, and

improving the rule of law. Civilian volunteers will often be at the same levels

of risk as the military units with whom they are partnered—which

reinforces the need for military-led efforts during “in-conflict” (rather than

“postconflict”) reconstruction and development capabilities.

While embedded with the Afghan-led communications campaign,

this new approach should be directly connected to the Afghan National

Development Strategy goals with Coalition military forces providing an

essential behind-the-scenes role: leadership from the rear. Only by

integrating all of these civil-military efforts in one team will synergy and

effectiveness be achieved. ce Coalition military commander must be

partnered with his Afghan National Army counterpart and the local

Afghan governmental leader—be it provincial governor or district

administrator. ce disjointed approaches employed to date—dividing

military and civil (and even Afghan) enterprises in the face of a resurgent

enemy—have taken us to the brink of failure. It is past time to make the

bold shift required to ensure success.

3. Establish Military and Civilian Unity of Effort

cis is most important at the local level. If effective, it reinforces the

restoration of trust between government and people. General

McChrystal’s eventual plan can create this local unity of effort for the first

time by fusing all players into a whole of collective ownership at the district

and provincial levels. Although in many respects this may initially infringe

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upon Afghan prerogatives, it will be judged by local populations by its

benefits to them.cis effort is an imperative to turn perceptions around at

the grassroots level.

ce August 2009 approval by NATO of an operational three-star

headquarters is a significant recognition of what has been a persistent

military shortfall over the past three years: a lack of operational unity of

effort in the theater. Further coordination with the UNAMA and

nongovernmental organizations is necessary to synchronize and deliver a

fully coordinated civilian-military COIN campaign.

A more unified military and civilian effort also assists the

communications effort. Clear chains of command and authority, commonly

agreed goals and objectives, and aggressive but coordinated execution

reinforce communication of key messages, give the Afghan government a

well-defined set of partners, and indicate to the population unwavering

seriousness of purpose. Unity of effort may further accelerate delivery of

essential services to the population and counteract claims of inefficiency

and corruption within the donor community.

4. Reframe the Public Narrative on Afghanistan

What is the endgame for the United States in the region? Until we

can clearly answer this question, for ourselves and for our friends in the

region, we have no sound policy. We do not have a clear definition of

success, and worse we have signaled that “exit” is the ultimate goal. cis is

strategically unsound and undercuts virtually any strategy we pursue.

ce rationale for staying and winning in Afghanistan has become

muddled in the United States and among our allies abroad. National leaders

must clearly articulate our endgame (presence, not exit) and lay out for our

peoples the serious risks attendant to failure. Several seemingly attractive

options are now on the table; the costs of failure attached to each are

enormous, yet are rarely articulated.ce moral imperative of not abandoning

the Afghan people, especially the women, to the depredations of the Taliban

once more must be part of this debate.ce risks of a regional, proxy civil war

and a deadly spread of instability into Pakistan must be clearly stated.

Finally, the risk of loss of credibility to the United States and the

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international community would have repercussions far beyond the borders

of Afghanistan and South Asia, and would influence every major foreign

policy issue for years to come.

ce fundamental flaw in any U.S. approach to Afghanistan or Pakistan

remains the lack of confidence in American staying power, demonstrated

by the common question from Afghans of every stripe: “You Americans are

not going to abandon us again, are you?”cis fundamental uncertainty drives

the Pakistanis (and now perhaps, Afghans) to weigh all national security

decisions in terms of the question: “What will this look like the day after the

Americans leave?” (cis is a repeated phrase.) We must directly confront

these fears by unequivocally asserting our intended long-term presence and

posture. Signaling that our long-term goal is “exit” deeply undercuts our

influence on all actors and bolsters the Taliban’s strategy. We must craft a

clear picture of what success looks like for our friends across the region that

includes persistence and commitment.

Now is the Time

Success or failure in Afghanistan will set the terms of further U.S.

involvement in the region for a generation. Will American credibility suffer

a fatal blow among our regional friends? Are they strong enough to stand

alone in the face of a resurgent extremist movement spanning the region?

Will the NATO alliance survive a defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan?

Will our extremist adversaries be catalyzed, both in the region and globally,

by their success in ejecting westerners from this part of the world? Does

this victory over the West energize a rebirth of violent Islamic extremism

where many see it waning today?

Short-term gains in avoiding the immediate cost in blood and treasure

in Afghanistan may well result in longer term and more dangerous threats

produced by our departure.cere are no cheap and easy solutions.cere are

immense costs associated with withdrawal before we achieve our objectives.

ce risks of any alternatives to the COIN approach outlined by General

McChrystal must be clearly and forcefully debated and understood. cese

risks affect not only our role in the region among friends and adversaries,

they also affect our oldest alliances and the credibility of our relationships

around the globe.

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Losing in Afghanistan after more than eight years of major

international effort will create potentially horrific results: an insecure

Pakistan, a return to deep sanctuary for al-Qaeda, increased regional

instability across south and central Asia, a lack of confidence in American

staying power and military prowess, and a fragmentation of NATO and the

transatlantic alliance. Failure is truly not an option.

Now is the time to reverse the trends of the past several years, to refocus

our national resolve, and to regain the trust of the Afghan people so that

they and their government can repulse the rising influence of the Taliban

and restore the chance for victory in this crucial region of the world.

Winning is possible—but we are facing our last opportunity to do so.

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Advising Afghan Military Forces

by Colonel Jeffery M. Haynes, USMC

My remarks are based on my experience in 2008 as the 201st Corps,

Afghan National Army (ANA) senior advisor. As senior advisor, I advised

the corps commander and I had a staff that advised his staff. I also had about

600 to 700 advisors from six different countries sprinkled throughout

Regional Command (RC) East and RC Capital. cat is what you know it

as. I know it as 201st Corps Area of Operations (AO). cat is part of our

problem; we view this as a U.S. problem, not an Afghan problem.

cis chapter will take us all the way down to the tactical level, maybe

even lower if you can get lower than that. But what I want to do is compel

decision makers to take action right away to give the ANA more of this

fight. I think that is one of our fundamental flaws. It is based partly on the

personality of American servicemembers because we want to do it ourselves

when we go somewhere. cat is what attracted us to the Army and the

Marine Corps. Well, in some cases, we have taken that too far and we are

not giving the ANA an opportunity to make a difference.

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We need to give them more ownership of the fight or, in some cases,

insist they take more ownership of it. We are not getting an adequate

return on our investment with the ANA. We have spent billions of

dollars. cere are pockets of brilliance. But there are areas where they

need huge improvement.

cat lack of effectiveness is based, in my mind, on the following four

reasons. And again, this is 2008 in the AO in which I was operating.

• cere is a lack of ANA leadership, accountability, and initiative—and

integrity, in some cases.

• I think we are using the wrong metric by using capability milestones.

cese do not measure the ANA’s combat effectiveness.

• We have extreme variations in advisor competence. We are not always

putting the right people over there with the right training. When we

do, it is a machine and it works well. When we don’t, it doesn’t work

as well.

• ce theme throughout is the ANA does not have a sense of

ownership of the problem.

Afghan National Army Leadership

Command selection in the ANA, at least when I left, was partially based

on ethnicity. cere are probably some good reasons for that based on their

history. cat is in policy. In practice, it is based a lot on who you know. As

a result, it is difficult for a senior commander to hold his subordinate

commanders accountable because they can easily do an end-around to

someone at the Ministry of Defense and General Staff and undo the

corrections the corps or brigade commander has tried to make.

Officer accountability is extremely uneven. We need to help them get

that right.cere is a lot of cronyism, a lot of “who do you know and who

are you connected to”—not in all cases, but in too many cases.

cis inability to fairly reward or punish breeds a lack of trust between

the leader and the led.cat inhibits operational effectiveness and initiative.

It also affects distribution of fuel, supplies, tactical orders, promotions,

command selection, and so on.

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8e Metric

More important, we need to talk about improving ANA effectiveness

in combat. Unfortunately, we measure this by ratings that are geared for

force generation.cey are called capability milestone ratings. It is how many

people they have, how many trucks, how many weapons, their logistics

capability, their training capability, and a little bit of subjectivity in there

about leadership. But this is a U.S.-centric tool for force generation, which

is good when you are allocating resources. It is not good when you are

measuring ANA performance.

It is not good because the ANA commanders are mildly interested in

capability milestone ratings. As advisors, it makes us crazy. We do the

monthly math drill. It gets sent up to higher authorities. Supposedly, the

president hears about it. cat is what they used to threaten us with. But,

you know, it didn’t make a difference because my Afghan counterpart only

knew about it when I went up and told him about it. In some cases, they

don’t want to be one of the highest milestones ratings because they are

scared we are going to leave and take all the money.

Despite all these challenges, though, there are some pockets of brilliance

within the ANA. Of the three brigades in 201st Corps, consider one of

them, General Zameri’s 3d Brigade. A very good commander, he operates

primarily in the Sarobi area. Uzbin is extreme eastern Kabul Province, about

sixty miles east of Kabul. cat is where the French got in that bad fight in

August 2008. He operates out there. He also operates in the Tagab Valley

of Kapisa Province just north of there, a very critical area.

With a very strong dose of what journalist Andrew Lubin calls

“muscular mentoring,” 3d Brigade developed, conceived, executed, and

continues to execute a very holistic, integrated counterinsurgency (COIN)

campaign in the Tagab Valley.

In the first phase, Zameri led this campaign with security and

development, which I thought was fascinating. It wasn’t clear-hold-build.

You start talking clear-hold-build to a pretty savvy Afghan COIN operator,

and he just thinks you are another linear-minded Westerner. In fact, I agreed

with his approach once I saw it in action. He uses that development to coopt the population, bring them to him, and provide intelligence at the same

time he is securing. Clear is the wrong tactical task anyway. I see plenty of

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Marines in here. We know what clear means. Clear is the wrong tactical

task in a COIN. cat means we are killing and breaking everything.

Fortunately, Zameri was beyond that type of thinking. But the

components of his campaign included expeditionary camps.We borrowed

some HESCO barriers from other units who weren’t looking. I gave them

to the Afghans. ce Afghans went out and started building their own

forward operating bases (FOBs). It worked very well. It signals that

permanent presence to the population, that the ANA is there to stay.cey

also built observation posts (OPs). Being from Texas, we love to fly our

flag. Well, the boys in Afghanistan, they get on that OP and they fly the

flag, and the locals see the Afghan flag on the high ground and it gives

them a sense of permanence and security. ce locals love to see the

Afghan army up there. cey don’t like seeing the police. I wasn’t a police

mentor. I won’t talk much about it. But I will tell you they like the army

in their battlespace.

ce campaign also included patrol and security operations that

disrupted an enemy primarily from the north and east.cey operated often

with the French battalion up there. cey worked very well. ce Afghans

also did road improvements, which facilitated the movement of security

forces that was absolutely critical and also facilitated goods to market. Part

of the campaign involves increasing business.

ce campaign, again, a great example of integrated Afghan leadership,

included local farmer training by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Our NGOs came in and, partly facilitated by the embedded training teams

(ETTs), taught the locals how to increase their crop yield with the

pomegranates there. cey also integrated or introduced saffron as a

replacement for poppy.

All of this was supported by some very savvy Afghan 3d Brigade officers

using the media. cey got on the radio and spoke to the people in their

language. What I loved about that is that it drew General Zameri to the

population. But the 101st Airborne Division (the Combined Joint Task

Force in command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2008) wanted me to

send them the message so they could approve it.cat didn’t go over well. An

Afghan is not going to have the United States approve a message in his own

language to his own people over a civilian radio station. ce campaign was

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also supported by town hall meetings, shuras1 maybe, talks by the Corps

religious officer, medical civic action programs, and humanitarian assistance

deliveries. ce bottom line—it was integrated.

ce population in Tagab now believes in the Afghan government

through the ANA, and the population is helping the army deny the

insurgents. Soon after this campaign started, we began receiving cell phone

calls. General Zameri received calls from locals telling us where improvised

explosive devices (IEDs) were planted. ce IEDs were actually there and

were found and reduced by ANA engineers.

ce campaign tells us that with good ANA leadership and good

creative mentorship, all those traits we have talked about that COIN

leaders and advisors have to have, that the ANA can transform a valley

once beholden to the enemy to where their lives are improving, an area

where the population is proud of the ANA. We also integrated some air

assault operations in Afghan helicopters with Afghan pilots, mentored,

but nobody behind the stick.

Now, let’s compare General Zameri’s Tagab campaign to what was

going on in Nangarhar and Nuristan Provinces about the same time. In

the spring of 2008, we had terrible Afghan leadership in place. I won’t

give you all the details. Again, I had to relieve an advisor from another

service and put Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Terlizzi out there to help fix

this. Bottom line, we had criminal activity—blatant criminal activity, total

disregard for the mission. It was putting my people at risk.

I was working with the corps commander to try to get some of these guys

relieved. Of course, it was an Afghan decision. I was trying to influence that.

He was having a heck of a time—back to that connection, that cronyism. We

had particular ethnic groups that were well connected. We couldn’t get rid of

them. After multiple trips to the general staff, I had to personally tell senior

leaders on the ANA staff in Kabul either the kandak2 commander starts

leading or I am pulling the ETT. cat sent absolute shockwaves that I was

going to pull an ETT and leave the kandak in Nuristan. When you pull the

ETT, you pull out access to enablers. You pull out cash. Sometimes you pull

out the ability to buy food and fuel for the ANA.

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1 Shura means “consultation” in Arabic; in general usage, it denotes a consultative council or assembly.

2 A kandak is the Afghan equivalent of a battalion.
My point is that it takes savvy, strong-willed leaders who can stand

up and do the right thing. And I use myself as an example. But below me,

there are many, many more great things.cere are great things going on

by my people who put their lives at risk every single day.

8e Advisors

We cannot shortchange the advising effort at all. It has to take a priority.

It has to take a priority in manning and training. Our advisors need to

model professionalism in everything they do. I commanded twenty-three

teams from six different countries. It is amazing the different levels of

experience we have out there. And you can’t really build a model based on

partnering or not partnering or advising because our advisors are so varied.

We have got to fix this.

Advisors have got to leave their egos at the door. cey have got to be

more interested in ANA success than their own success. cey have to view

their success by their Afghan counterparts’success.cey have to understand

Afghan culture.cey have to understand ANA culture.ce two are slightly

different. cey have to be creative. cey have to have perseverance. cey

have to be able to endure.

cey have to be able to engage the Coalition. cis may be upsetting to

some people, but sometimes the Coalition is a problem for the Afghan army.

Sometimes they belittle them. Sometimes they want to put them in the

corner. Sometimes they want to misuse them or relegate them to the back.

We can’t have that.

Ownership

As we grow the ANA, I recommend we make our units larger in

Afghanistan because we don’t have enough adequate leadership to go around.

Eventually, we have to grow more kandaks, but for the time being, let’s take

a 649-man battalion, let’s make it 900. We just don’t have enough leaders to

go around. Plus, there is a little history of defection with Afghan units.

Number two, give the ANA battlespace today. Right now, give them

battlespace within capability. Have a competent adjacent unit with them.

You had better have good advisors to give the ANA battlespace now. I think

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they already have battlespace in Tagab, but giving them battlespace will

trigger that initiative, and an ANA commander will not want to lose face if

he owns the problem.

Number three, we have got to drop the term battlespace owner. It is

offensive. It is wrong. I don’t think it is tactical in any dictionary I have ever

read for terms and graphics. But the U.S. battlespace owner doesn’t own the

battlespace. If he did, we wouldn’t have so many doggone bad guys in it. But

it sends the message to the Afghans that this is a Coalition problem. Once we

got it figured out and I explained to the Afghans what that really means—

they manage the forward air controllers and they help us out with fires, which

is certainly important, and casualty evacuation all too often for my ETTs.

cat is extremely important. But we change the name every time. Bayonet

becomes Duke. Warrior changes to Cyclone. My favorite, Gladiator went to

Gladius. Try doing that through an interpreter to your Afghan counterpart.

Number four, beware of overpartnering. I believe partnering should be

done early in the life cycle, but there is no substitute for aggressive, motivated,

confident, stubborn ETTs hand-in-hand with their Afghans every day. cis

partnering business, I think it sounds good, but too much of it is based on the

personality of the partner unit’s commander. And some are going to be really

good. Some are just going to want them to guard the FOB.

ce ANA see us as very rich and we are, having all the toys.cey will

be glad to sit on the FOB because they are there for a lifetime. We are

there for a year. Every new Coalition unit comes in with their vision of

how they are going to save the world. cey are all about letting you have

it. So if you overpartner, I caution you to just be careful.

Number five, metrics. Our metric does not need to be capability

milestone ratings. It’s pretty simple. It needs to be how much battlespace the

ANA controls.

Number six, we need to have brigade- and corps-level mentors who can

mentor Tagab-like campaigns. You need to pick the right valleys. cis is a

valley fight. You need to help the ANA through some human terrain

analysis. Understanding the culture, marry that with the innate

understanding of the Afghans and their understanding of the culture. Pick

the right valleys and endeavor to transform them.ce people in Afghanistan

like the ANA.cey like helicopters.cey like that OP behind me.cey like

to see that. cey don’t care if it doesn’t look good and it is not per the 6-4

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or Military Decision Making Process-1. If it is a clunky, ugly Afghan

solution, that is much better than a perfect Coalition solution.

While these campaigns are going on, the mentors should be out

acquiring other enablers—NGOs, U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Teams

(PRTs)—working with the Coalition to get that unity of effort to help the

Afghans implement a holistic COIN program and campaign.

And last, I have alluded to it already, we need to give the ANA enablers.

I tried to start an ANA PRT. ce ANA need their own PRT. If they are

going to take the COIN fight, they need to do COIN-like things. Now, it

needs to be heavily mentored, of course. We need to give the ANA funds for

projects, again, heavily mentored. I am not that naïve. But we need them to

have what I call COIN enablers so they can further implement more Tagabs.

At the end of the day, this is what I think we need: strong ANA leaders,

obviously, encouraged and mentored by strong advisors to take the ANA to

the next level. We need advisors who understand the larger picture,

understand the long-term picture that it is about ANA development, about

giving the ANA within capacity—not ahead of their time, but within

capacity—ownership of the fight. If we don’t do this, we are going to be

there for a very long time. Our grandkids are going to be there.

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Qe Afghan Election and the Future of Afghanistan’s

Leadership: A Discussion

Robert D. Kaplan, Clare Lockhart, Amin Tarzi, and Jeffrey Gedmin

Robert D. Kaplan

When we organized this panel some months ago, we assumed that the

Afghan elections would be in hindsight by now, and that we would move on

to the next story, so to speak, with finality.

cat has not happened. Without putting too fine a point on it, the

Afghan elections, rather than further legitimizing the Afghan government

and power structure, have thrown its legitimacy into doubt. And I am being

very polite on that score.Yet, at the same time, one of the fundamental points

of realist theory going all the way back to cucydides is that you work with

the material at hand. Not only can you only work with the material at hand,

you have to work with the material at hand at that specific moment.

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Chapter 12
Had we made different decisions six or nine months ago, we would have

had, perhaps, more alternatives in terms of Afghan leadership than we have

now. But let me tell you a bit about Afghanistan’s past.cere is a cliché out

there that Afghanistan was always a barbaric place. It was never really a

country. It is about building something from nothing.

cree-and-a-half decades ago, I traveled through Afghanistan as a

visitor, and I was able to go all over the country by bus in complete safety

on major and minor roads. cis was a time when malaria eradication was

almost complete, when Afghanistan had a fairly stable government under a

monarch who controlled the major roads, major towns, and about 50 to 75

percent of the territory around there.

cere were several decades of the twentieth century where Afghanistan

was a viable state just as there were several decades in the same era when

Iraq was close to being a viable democracy. ce Afghans yearned for this

pre-mid-1970s order so much that in 1996, when the Taliban came in, they

initially embraced them thinking that they would bring order to the country.

Well, they did, but it was more or less the order of the grave.

cere are real themes in Afghan history that argue that all is not lost,

that something can be done. Let me note that many of these questions about

elections and government legitimacy go back to a 1968 Yale University Press

book by Professor Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing

Societies. Huntington wrote that to hold elections is not necessarily

progressive. Progressive is the building of institutions. And how do you build

institutions? Institutions often come through authoritarian regimes that

become less authoritarian as time goes on. One has examples in Taiwan,

South Korea, Chile, and other places. So these philosophical questions that

Huntington posed over four decades ago are still with us.

Clare Lockhart

I absolutely agree with Robert Kaplan that we need to step back from

the question of elections as an event and look at the question of institutions

that allow participation, empowerment, and governance in general.

Over the last weeks, we have seen something of a false debate about

whether we are trying to create a Valhalla or a Switzerland on the one hand,

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or whether we should leave the country to anarchy and chaos on the other.

I think the question is neither of those things. It is the question of what is

appropriate governance for the context.

If we look back over the recent years, over the last decades, and over the

centuries in Afghanistan, we do see that governance of high or reasonable

standard is absolutely possible. As we just heard, anyone who has spent time

in the villages in Afghanistan understands the enormous desire of the people

for ordinary lives and their understanding that ordinary lives are enabled by

rule of law, predictability, and order. cat is grounds for hope

I question the mental model and view, which may be informed by the

1980s and the 1990s in Afghanistan, of the country as ungovernable as a

state of nature, of the warlordism that is so different from the tribal culture

in the country.

ce second ground for hope is that appropriate governance was

absolutely possible in the country is the 1950s and 1960s, the middle years

of the last century. Amin Tarzi is an absolute expert on this period. How was

the state formed? And how did it function?

I recently received a 1950s manual from another Afghan expert, which

is a picture book showing governance functioning in all the provinces in

all the line ministries of industrial factories, of education departments, of

health departments.

I think the third reason we really have grounds for hope is the period of

2001 to 2005, after the tragedy of 9/11, after the Bonn Agreement, where for

the first three years, it was possible to establish institutions in Afghanistan. I

had the enormous privilege to serve on the ground at that time and witnessed

the establishment of the 1st Battalion of the Afghan National Army [ANA].

In just six months it went from an idea in a small group of people’s minds to

its graduation. Watching the pride of ordinary Afghan citizens and seeing

that battalion march down the street was incredible.

ce National Solidarity Program was rolled out. It gives a block grant

to every village in the country where the village shuras elect their council,

decide on their projects, and manage it themselves. It is now in 23,000

villages. cis wasn’t rocket science; it is a system that works.

ce same with the health program, the same with the currency

conversion and telecoms. Each of these programs required very few civilians,

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Qe Afghan Election and the Future of Afghanistan’s Leadership: A Discussion
most were designed by a handful of people. And they were driven by

committed and dedicated Afghan leadership.

I think good governance is possible. It is also necessary for

Afghanistan to rejoin the community of nations as a responsible sovereign

power, responsible both to its international obligations and its people. It

will have to meet those responsibilities and manage its own institutions,

and that is what is going to allow the eventual exit strategy. We may not

want to talk about an exit strategy at the moment. But it is inevitable that

at some point, there will be an exit strategy. And that strategy must be

dependent on a framework of sovereignty.

cen comes the question of what standard. We are not trying to

create Switzerland, but what are the standards? What are the services?

What are the functions? I am going to point to just four pillars of these.

ce absolute first is security, the Afghan National Security Forces, most

critically the ANA, a police force, and intelligence services that carry out

their appropriate functions, and are the right size for the country.

ce second pillar of governance consists of mechanisms for decision

making. Perhaps we need to look again at the suitability of a very centralized

presidential system and consider what those mechanisms of governance,

decision making, and accountability are. Even within the constructs of the

existing constitution, it was an enormous gain to have that constitution. But

that constitution allows for all sorts of subnational laws. And I think those

are the spaces where we need to look at how governance is carried out.

ce third pillar relates to public finance and accountability. We hear a

lot about the corruption of the existing regime. We hear a lot from the

population about their dissatisfaction with the corruption. I think we need

to turn that around and think instead about how we build systems of

accountability. And that means how revenue is collected. I believe the

country could be collecting somewhere between $5 and $10 billion a year

in revenue if it managed its mines, border posts, and agriculture and business

revenues appropriately.

cis also means a budget process, the central mechanism of governance

in any country. We need to make the budget process Afghanistan’s central

mechanism. cen, look at expenditures, at how the payroll system works.

Ask, how do civil servants get paid? How does procurement work?

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ce fourth pillar is basic services. Roughly speaking, at the village level,

they are expecting very reasonable things. As we heard in the 2004 loya

jirga,1 district leader after district leader stood up, each wanting access to

basic education, health, irrigation, roads, and water.

It is very difficult to hold elections in the middle of the war. Maybe it

wasn’t the right process, but we are where we are. When the group of people

put together the Bonn Agreement in 2001, there were very strong voices in

the room who said, “Please don’t rush to elections in two-and-a-half years

because if there aren’t the underlying institutions to enable fair elections, then

it is going to set the country back.” I think their voices were quite prescient.

Certainly, we now see the Independent Election Commission and

the Electoral Complaints Commission [ECC] have admitted significant

flaws in the process. We need to understand that it is wrong for the U.S.

leadership or the Afghan people to get the blame. We need an inquiry or

lessons-learned process into what went wrong. Essentially, what happened

is that one person chose to, and was allowed to, commit systematic fraud,

and the UN [United Nations] team permitted that fraud, and didn’t

investigate at the time what happened.

Afghans for Civil Society wrote to the UN leadership two months

before the election pointing out what was likely to happen. cose flaws

weren’t addressed. Going forward to salvage the concept of democracy and

elections and to salvage the trust and reputation of the UN in the country,

we need to learn lessons and consider what institutions are necessary to hold

elections. cere are going to be parliamentary elections next year. Do we

need, for example, a census with biometric identity for the country? How

does the voter registration get processed, get organized? We need

logisticians to think through these steps.

ce election process did have some benefits, not least the vibrant

public debate among the Afghan citizens about their identity and about

what they want for the future. So I don’t think we should write it off as

a failure. Given where we are now, I think there are three options for

forming a government.ce first would be a unity government of the two

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Qe Afghan Election and the Future of Afghanistan’s Leadership: A Discussion

1 In Pashto, loya jirga means “grand council.” A loya jirga is usually convened for such major events as

selecting a king or ratifying a constitution.
challengers and perhaps other key figures who would bring together the

political forces and govern for the next five years.

ce second would be for the ECC to invalidate either a sufficient

number of boxes; one of the candidates; or the process as a whole, which is

an option within the electoral law. cen, perhaps, through the good offices

of the UN, with somebody like Lakhdar Brahimi who has intense respect

of the population and the political elite in Afghanistan, to form a

transitional government that would be tasked as a caretaker to regain the

trust of the population, exercise governance, and hold elections again after

a period of time.

ce third option would be that the incumbent President Karzai forms a

new government, either his own or perhaps he enters into a new compact with

the international community with clear lines of accountability and

responsibility, and signs up to a “road map”with strict standards of governance.

In general, we all need to move away from a focus on an individual. If

we look back in history to periods of successful transitions in countries

around the world, it was never just an individual. It was a team and a system

of governance that was critical. I think we need to invest—and the country

needs to invest—in growing new leaders who can work in the cabinet

positions, at the governor level, at the district level, and not just in

government, but in business and civil society.

Leadership is absolutely possible in Afghanistan. I had the honor to

travel to Peshawar just after the Bonn Agreement and interview heads of

Afghan NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]. cey built 2,000-strong

organizations running health-care and education systems. I was impressed

then, and I continue to be impressed, with their bravery and leadership

abilities. cere are thousands of people in the country who could lead, but

they need to be supported and we need to focus on that issue.

Finally, looking at the question of governance, engagement is

necessary. But we need to move away from a focus on the state and Kabul

to take a much broader focus on the Afghan people. So the approach of

COIN [counterinsurgency] to stabilization of Afghanistan is

tremendously important and exactly the right approach. We need to look

not just at the state, but the balance between governance, the market and

job creation, and civil society and citizenship.

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We need to understand that the use of force alone is not going to lead

to stability. We need to look at the other mechanisms of governance, of

economics, and civil-society building, that have to be both complementary

and integral to a COIN campaign.

We understand that it is the pull factor of good governance and job

creation that is going to draw people away from the insurgency and prevent

them from signing up. And it recognizes the enormous desire for change of

the Afghan population.

Amin Tarzi

I stand before you as a living specimen of the times that Robert Kaplan

and Tom Ricks were in Kabul. Yes, there were times when things were a bit

better. It wasn’t perfect, but the system functioned. I think when you look

back at 2001 with hindsight, somehow the entire experience of Afghanistan

pre-1979, the Soviet invasion or pre-Taliban period, was just thrown out

the window.

We started on a tabula rasa, a carte blanche, as if there was nothing

in there. I think that may have been one of the greater mistakes, of not

looking at institutions, at the experiences of these people and also

forgetting that history that was with those people, because it was not just

a history of war and being wounded physically, it was a history also of

psychological trauma and how each saw the other. All this has to be

woven into the tapestry of how we go forward.

If you look at COIN as an argument between two ideas for the Afghan

people, it is whether the Afghan people want the idea that is presented by

us—the Afghan government supported by all the governments, including

our own and the institutions that are supported—or what is out there with

insurgency. COIN is winning that argument, winning the people to our

side.cat is the whole thing about COIN because in the end, it is about the

people. cat is the consensus here. ce question is how to do it.

If you look at and analyze the recent election, it has unfortunately

helped the insurgency and not us.Why? Because it has shown again that the

insurgents’ rhetoric, their claim that this democracy is fake, that it doesn’t

mean anything, has been unfortunately amplified by events. It is more an

echo of what happened in Iran in June of this year rather than something

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Qe Afghan Election and the Future of Afghanistan’s Leadership: A Discussion
that we, the Western world and the champions of democracy, could offer. So,

we have a setback rather than a step forward.

Let’s take that into account. Consider the issue of Lieutenant General

David Barno’s point about how to restore confidence and trust in the

government of Afghanistan. And here I say government of Afghanistan,

and I totally agree with Clare Lockhart: it is not the individual.

ce other mistake we collectively made was putting all of our eggs in

one basket. I am not criticizing Karzai here. It is the fact that he had come

to understand that he is indispensable. We made him as if he was

indispensable, and are paying for that mistake right now. He thought that

without him, Afghanistan cannot exist.

How do we restore confidence in the government of the Islamic

Republic of Afghanistan because without doing that—even if we have an

ANA that is capable, even if we have the miracle of an Afghan National

Party, which is right now in shambles—nothing matters if the government

of Afghanistan is not seen as legitimate. As I noted, we have already taken

a setback with this election. We now have to think over whatever time we

have on how to restore confidence. And part of this is not connecting. Part

of this is mindset.

When you look at Afghanistan—that is why I called out its full name:

government of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan—we have to remember this

is an Islamic country. Sometimes we forget that. ce constitution of

Afghanistan is a very Islamic constitution. What is the basis of governance

in Islam? It is security and justice hand-in-hand. cat is another element

that was forgotten in Bonn. When you look at the distribution of areas of

responsibility, we took the military, the Germans took the police, and so on.

Justice was pretty much left alone. We are starting today.

Afghan justice is not what we think in Western terms. Sometimes,

justice is what the Taliban brings. It may not be a justice that we like. A

magazine reporter recently spoke at Marine Corps University about his time

in Southern Ghazni Province. He said the Taliban didn’t do anything.cey

just had a very crude security and justice system. Initially, that is all that

matters. Of course, later on, as the society evolves, you want other things.We

have heard that while there was security in Afghanistan, there was not a lot

of electricity or other things that we regard as essentials of life.

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So, let us first provide those two aspects, security and justice. As we

build and expand on those, taking care of essentials and finally the

nonessential “fun things,” you get the people really on your side. cen, we

don’t have to be there. It will be a country that can stand on its own.cat is

the vision. I don’t think it is a dream. But it is a vision that starts with their

mindset rather than ours, with their blueprint rather than one we provide.

I think we have to work on that confidence yesterday. At Parris Island that

was the saying: you had to start yesterday. We have lost that time already, so

we have to recoup the lost time beyond anything else kinetic we want to do

on the ground.

I totally agree with Colonel Jeff Haynes that we have a lot of leverage

over the Afghan government. But we do not use it. Using it does not mean

abusing or belittling Afghan officials in public. It means pushing backdoor

policies with direct consequences. We just heard that in Tagab Valley, the

threat of withholding American or French support made things change.We

need to do the same thing in Kabul.

Certain people in Kabul are literally getting away with murder. And

they are still in power. One thing we cannot forget when we talk about

leadership that whatever they do wrong, we have done wrong. We cannot

divorce ourselves from their acts. When they commit injustices, when they

bring people who have raped, killed, and maimed thousands of Afghans and

bring them into the government, it reflects on us.

I am being very blunt because we have Marines and soldiers there who

are dying. It is important to look at what we are doing. We have to have a

policy that whoever comes in power—and it will most likely be a

government of President Karzai—when he arrives, he comes with a very

clear understanding that this is not business as usual, with very specific

benchmarks. Some of them do not have to be public.

Our negotiation tactics and the Afghan understanding sometimes do

not match. Another thing, we have to look at what’s next. We made a

mistake with this year’s elections. We did not prepare for it. If we look

back at 2004, 2005, we left things as they were. As the election came in,

there was a scramble. We were hiring people left and right in this very

town to go to Afghanistan.

We have set next year’s two very important elections already. One is for

parliament, and the second—district elections—is one that was never

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previously held.ce campaign to make certain that next year’s elections are

beyond reproach should begin today. We have all spoken about Afghanistan

as a decentralized country.cere is a way to use that decentralization legally,

not as what Afghan government officials sometimes tell us, that “you are

building a tree and are cutting its branches.” No.

We are implementing the Afghan constitution, which calls for district

council elections not by the government but elected from the people. cis

legally empowers the district. I suggested to Colonel Julian D. Alford that

we not use the word tribe; use the word district. A few districts become a

tribe. We can work legally through the Afghan system without changing

anything in the constitution.

cis needs very good Information Operations, something that could be

done through the radio systems. Afghanistan is still a very illiterate country,

so radio is king. To get people’s minds on the election and that we, the

Coalition, are working to empower them and make their government

accountable, is something that has to be done right now. If not, if next year’s

elections are botched again, we are not going to do well in this place.

Lastly, for the Afghan system of governance, we have to force their hands

in specific areas because what is happening, in my view, is a bonus to the

opposition and to our detriment and also that of the Afghan government.ce

rhetoric that comes out of Kabul today uses anti-American and anti-British

sentiments as a means to play their political game. We cannot allow a

government that we support to make statements like theirs.cat should stop.

We have to look at the way our message comes across to Afghans.

Unfortunately, it is not very clear. We need a unity of message specifically

from the civilian side.ce civilian message must come from one source and

have no contradictions. Different centers of U.S. power cannot send different

messages.ce UN and other agencies further complicate matters with their

messages, which are invariably different from each other. Mixed messages

result in lost credibility.

Jeffrey Gedmin

As best I can tell, everything is a battle of the narrative. In families, it is

the battle of the narrative. It domestic politics, it is the battle of narrative.

In office politics, he who controls the narrative often defines the day.

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As many of you know, this fall, 9 November precisely, is the twentieth

anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you look back to one country,

East Germany, over the subsequent two decades you could make a number

of observations, including that it has been very difficult for the country to

attain self-sustaining economic growth.

For the better part of the last two decades, it has been plagued by

pockets of relative poverty and, in some regions, exceptionally high levels of

up to 30 percent unemployment. It is a country, despite immense

advantages, that in too many instances had been plagued by xenophobia,

right-wing radicalism, left-wing populism, and anti-Americanism.cis was

the part of Eastern Europe after the fall of communism that was going to

be the immediate and relatively simple success case. After all, it benefited

from West German largess. It had an educated population. It was ethnically,

religiously, culturally, and linguistically homogeneous. By joining Germany

in unification, it became a de facto or immediate member of NATO [North

Atlantic Treaty Organization] and the European Union and as such,

surrounded by democracies.

I tell you this not because East Germany has much in common with

Afghanistan, although they are roughly the same size in population.cey are

really quite different, as you know. In the case of Afghanistan, it couldn’t be

more different—a society that is largely agrarian, illiterate, tribal, and

culturally complex, and facing a vicious and violent insurgency.

But no matter what you think about Afghanistan, its elections, and the

future of that country and its leadership, we as Americans have to be

fantastically patient because East Germany with its many advantages is two

decades down its road to joining the West. Is Afghanistan, even with the

wisest policies and the most perfect execution, going to turn around in five,

seven, ten, eleven, or even twelve years? I don’t think it is going to happen.

cere are two points that I would like to make. ce first, which is so

simple and elusive in Washington, DC, is that Americans desperately need

very clear war aims. A number of the panelists today addressed this, as did

Lieutenant General David Barno. cose war aims should be so clear, they

should be clear as a bell, crystal clear.cen, from the U.S. political leadership,

for domestic and international purposes, the aims should be repeated hourly,

by the minute. I don’t think it could possibly be over-communicated enough.

Speaking for myself, the first war aim is very simple, and it is why we went to

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Afghanistan in the first place. cat is to guarantee that we have a minimally

acceptable government there that closes the country to international terrorists

so that al-Qaeda cannot again operate safe havens in Afghanistan.

ce second is to have a government or succession or series of

governments in that country that are broadly speaking—and I emphasize

broadly speaking—forces for moderation, education, economic

development, and human rights. My fear is that at this very crucial moment,

we are getting bogged down and getting confused. We are entering into

what one of the panelists referred to as a “crisis of confidence.”

Everybody talks about clocks ticking. In preparation for today, I printed

out a number of articles from newspapers such as the New York Times,

Washington Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among them.

Every single article cites timetables, exit strategies, viable timeframes, target

dates, and deadlines. Of course, few of them talk about success strategies.We

have done this before and we have been there before.

First comes the success strategy and then the exit strategy. I think if you

believe in this mission and its successful outcome, we all have reason to be

concerned. If you look at the Right, there is talk of the hubris of the nation

builders, Americans who want to do social engineering. As one leading FOX

commentator said on my television in my hotel room this morning,

“Afghanistan can’t be a democracy.” We know that. It is tribal.

cen on the Left, you have overreach with people talking about our

mission there to be the eradication of poverty, the end of corruption.ce Los

Angeles Times ran a piece two weeks ago in which a professor, a

distinguished one at that, argued that if we can’t establish women’s rights in

Afghanistan, we should go home. I am for women’s rights, by the way. But

if that means by American standards, by standards of 2009, by standards of

Southern California today, now, next year, I am doubtful.

I think that there is a considerable amount of middle ground between

these two extremes as this debate becomes more polarized and we fall into

false dichotomies. I think there is room for measures that are appropriate,

consistent with our values, and realistic, and that support our national

security objectives.

I am president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Europe is free.

Based in Prague, we do more than radio. We broadcast to twenty countries

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in twenty-eight languages and one of those countries is Afghanistan.

We do the same kind of so-called surrogate broadcasting that we did

during the Cold War. It is not propaganda. It is not messaging. It is not

strategic communications.

It provides a country that doesn’t have a free media, or a country where

free and independent media is not fully established, mature, reliable, and

accurate, and provides them information in their language in their own

domestic terms. Amin Tarzi made this point. It is not always about us.

Sometimes it is actually—and surprisingly—about them. We provide

domestic news and information to Afghans throughout the country in all

thirty-four provinces with 100 reporters on the ground broadcasting in Dari

and Pashtu, principally in radio—it is a radio society—politics, social affairs,

women’s issues, health care, music, satire, and on and on.

What Robert Kaplan said was so apt. He travelled there thirty-five years

ago and found a different Afghanistan. What we are doing is not imposing.

What we are doing is not dictating. cere is a constituency in Afghanistan

for pluralism and tolerance. cere is a very rich tradition. We in our work

found, find, and are finding that sweet spot, if I may say. We are, despite the

threats of the Taliban—they kidnap our reporters, threaten us, and the

reporters’families. You know why? cey don’t want us off the air.cey want

equal time on the air. cey want to participate. cey understand the value

of the information war, of the battle for hearts and minds.

Despite all that, we are called Radio Azadi locally. It means “Radio

Liberty,” and we are the single most popular radio station in all of

Afghanistan, from Kabul to the provinces. I am sure some of you remember

that movie,Miracle on 34th Street, where they prove the existence of Santa

Claus with letters. In Kabul and Prague—and Amin Tarzi knows this better

than me because he used to work for Radio Azadi— each week we get

hundreds, literally hundreds, not dozens, but hundreds of letters from young

and old, wealthy and poor, and educated and illiterate talking about the

issues that you would care about, that would inspire you. It gives us hope that

there is this middle ground between some sort of medieval terrorist empire

and something we would love, but we won’t get anytime soon—a perfect

Jeffersonian democracy.

Let me close with an appeal. I think we need very clear war aims. I think

we need very clear expectations about what we can and cannot achieve. And

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Qe Afghan Election and the Future of Afghanistan’s Leadership: A Discussion
I think we must be very realistic about what is happening on the ground.

Again, as Robert Kaplan observed, we work with the material we have.Well,

I have two concerns in the debate right now that, I think, are either being

exaggerated or misused. It takes us full circle and has to do with the elections

and the general topic of corruption. I am for fair and free elections, and I am

against fraud, and I am against corruption. But realism dictates that we are

working with what we have.

My concern is that these issues, while very important and impediments

to progress, if we are not balanced and keep them in perspective, as a nation,

we will be acting without sufficient maturity and farsightedness. ce goals

are bigger. cis is a nation in deep transition, which will take decades for it

and its people to resolve.

When you read and hear commentary from some quarters about the

election fraud and the fraudulent government and corruption, it is in my view,

an excuse to leave before we have accomplished what we want to accomplish.

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A Conversation with General David H. Petraeus,

USA

General Petraeus: It’s wonderful to see so many familiar faces, so many

important members of what’s come to be known as “counterinsurgency

nation”here today. But looking at a lot of those who are out in this audience

and knowing that I’ve PowerPointed many of you within an inch of your

intellectual lives on various occasions, I concluded that the most productive

approach this afternoon might be indeed a conversation facilitated by a great

Marine leader and a great military historian. cat is, of course, [retired

Lieutenant] General [Bernard E.] Trainor.

Well, that was my thinking, but then, being a U.S. Army general officer,

the idea of a presentation without PowerPoint prompted me to reconsider.

It’s genetic.

And so what I thought I’d do is set the scene with four or five slides that

provide context for the challenges that our leaders are facing in the overall

[U.S.] Central Command [CENTCOM] area of responsibility and then

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Chapter 13
have our conversation and Q&A with, of course, a full deck of slides

available on call as required.

Finally, my apologies to those who showed up hoping to see this session

be all Afghanistan, all the time, and to hear me divulge predecisional details

on force recommendations or my advice to the secretary of defense and the

president. As we were reminded, the conference focus is leadership in

counterinsurgency. I know you’ve had some great sessions on that subject

already today, and that should be the focus of the questions this afternoon.

I can assure you it will be the focus of my answers.

I was privileged to serve one summer under the great General Jack

Galvin when he was the commander-in-chief of U.S. Southern Command

and we were engaged in El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, and a variety of other

places. I remember watching him with the press and when he was done—

I was a special assistant—he asked: “Well, what did you think?” I said,

“Gosh, sir, it seemed super. You got all your points across, but it struck me

that you didn’t answer any of their questions.”He said,“Well, they didn’t ask

any of mine.”

cis is Central Command [Figure 2]. Some of you will remember

Central Command and a world prior to 1 October last year when there was

one less geographic combatant commander and when Central Command

still had the Horn of Africa. But with the standup of African Command

that date, the start of the fiscal year, there are now six geographic combatant

commands to go along with the four other combatant commands that have

specified functions. Central Command is, therefore, the smallest of the

geographic combatant commands, but regrettably, it seems to have the lion’s

share of the problems.

CENTCOM starts with Egypt in the west, Pakistan in the east,

Kazakhstan and the other central Asian states in the north, and down

through Yemen and the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, the waters

off Somalia—so we get to do piracy—and everything in between. All told,

twenty countries. We have ambassadors in eighteen of them.

You can see the various challenges that exist there. It’s a region of haves

and have-nots: the richest per capita country in the world, and also among the

poorest countries in the world, extraordinarily blessed in oil and natural gas,

but often poor in freshwater. Some countries have spectacular construction

activities ongoing, and others have very substandard services, inadequate

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governance, and a host of other challenges to confront, and therefore, are, in

many cases, fertile ground for planting the seeds of extremism.

So, these are the challenges that are out there and you know about them:

al-Qaeda and a handful of other transnational terrorist and extremist

organizations; we have the activities of countries like Iran which continue

to arm, train, fund, and equip Shia extremist elements in Iraq to a modest

degree; Afghanistan; Hamas and Gaza; and Lebanese Hezbollah in

southern Lebanon.

cere’s the piracy issue. I’d be happy to talk about that. Touch wood,

but we’ve actually made a bit of progress against that with the Zone Defense

against the mother ships. cey’re parked off the coast of Somalia. ce

challenge there, of course, being a failed state. And, of course, we still do

support operations that are conducted in this area by AFRICOM [U.S.

Africa Command] with assets that come out of the Central Command

region or from the naval component commander, Special Operations

Command in particular.

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Figure 2. CENTCOM AREA OF RESPONSIBILITY
Obviously, we still have the operations in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and the

major effort ongoing in Pakistan as well, among others. cis shows the

elements that are in the Central Command [Figure 3], and in a snapshot

what it is that we’re trying to do across the AOR [Area of Responsibility]

in terms of—to replace the traditional Great Game, the competition for

power and influence among the powers of the world with a broad

partnership against extremism in the illegal narcotics trafficking industry

that comes out of Afghanistan. Obviously, a major effort is supporting our

partners in Pakistan, where we’ve seen heartening developments over the

course of the last five months, in particular against those elements seen by

the Pakistanis as threatening their writ of government and very existence.

But also in some of the operations and the Federally Administered Tribal

Areas that have resulted in the death of some key leaders, among them

Baitullah Mehsud. And there are the concerns about Iran and its actions,

including its continued efforts in the nuclear arena, which many analysts

would assess as the components of an effort to achieve a nuclear weapons

capability and the means to deliver it with their missile testing.

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Figure 3. CENTCOM AREA OF RESPONSIBILITY AND FOCUS
I am happy to show you the latest statistics on Iraq where there

continues to be very substantial progress, still down to somewhere around

twenty attacks per day even with Iraqi data used, which we’ve now put in

retroactively [Figure 4].cat’s down, of course, from more than 160 attacks

per day back around June 2007. Although we have seen horrific bombings

back on the 19th of August—Black Wednesday, it’s termed—by and large,

significant damage was done to al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni and Shia

extremists still present. But there have been such vastly reduced levels of

violence that the reconstruction has proceeded with the rebuilding of just

about all the bridges that were blown up by the extremists back in 2006–07.

And the pipelines are all flowing. Iraq has the highest oil exports in its

history, and back in August the highest electricity production, I think, in

their history as well. Plus the number of the major hospitals that are now

opened—Fallujah, Basrah Children’s Hospital, and others—is increasing.

So there’s quite a bit of progress there, albeit many, many challenges

remain.ce Sunni-Shia, the political “speed dating” that’s going on as they

prepare for the January 2010 elections—intra-Shia, intra-Sunni, SunniKurd, or Arab-Kurd internal boundary disputes; you name it, there are

plenty of challenges there and no shortage of issues that have to be resolved.

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Figure 4. SECURITY INCIDENTS IN IRAQ
We continue to support the Lebanese Armed Forces. And there was a

heartening development in the elections, not so heartening yet in the formation

of a government by Saad Hariri. But they are coming along, working hard to

continue the partnership, their long-standing partnership with Egypt. By the

way, we’re going to do the first big Bright Star exercise1 this year that we’ve

done in a number of years, I think probably since 2002 or so.

If you’re going to characterize the overall effort against al-Qaeda and

other transnational extremists in the region, I think you would say that it is

mildly positive. Actually, the development extends all the way from the

Federally Administered Tribal Areas over into Iraq; Lebanon; Egypt; the

Gulf States; certainly Saudi Arabia, which has had a very impressive, wholeof-government effort to counter terrorism there—and there’s something I’ll

highlight at the bottom here in a moment as the way of going after this—

with the exception of Yemen, and that’s where al-Qaeda in the Arabian

Peninsula has established its headquarters.

cis is a concern. Yemen is a country that faces the al-Houthi threat in

the north, southern secessionists in the south, and they have al-Qaeda in

the Arabian Peninsula and some of the southern tribal areas. So again, that

is a concern and they do tie into al-Qaeda East Africa, which of course,

recently lost its leader.

I mentioned the piracy effort and this very substantial series of

partnerships that we have undertaken with countries along the western side

of the Persian Gulf there, many of them in a sense motivated because of

concern over Iran’s rhetoric and actions.

Interestingly, Iran has been the best recruiter for Central Command

when it comes to a variety of these activities. As an example, there are

eight Patriot missile batteries now up and radiating in the west side of the

Gulf in four different locations, two each in four countries where some

time ago there were none of those. So a lot of other activities as you would

imagine in the ballistic missile defense arena, assure early warning and

air defense. Countries are very substantially embracing bilateral

arrangements that we can then turn into multilateral effects, we believe

with a lot of maritime activity as well.

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1 Operation Bright Star is a biennial, multinational exercise conducted by U.S., Egyptian, and

Coalition forces.
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Who is it out there doing all this? cis was an insight out of the

strategic assessment, and is not related to Afghanistan.

Let me very clear about this. cis is something I’ve been briefing for

about eight months since we had this strategic assessment by the great

Colonel H. R. McMaster, who honchoed that as he did three of those for

us in Iraq during the surge period in 2007–08.

ce point here is that to counter terrorism—and I’m talking terrorism

writ large, extremism—requires more than just your special mission unit

forces. It really requires a whole-of-governments counterinsurgency

approach. cat does not mean that we have to be the ones providing the

forces or all the resources or anything else. It does mean that many different

governmental agencies, civil-military partnerships, and again, a

comprehensive approach to these problems, is the answer.

I would hold out, frankly, as an example, what the kingdom of Saudi

Arabia has done, because they have had a superb program.Yes, their assistant

interior minister was nearly blown up the other day [28 August 2009],

Prince Mohammed bin Naif, who has been a very important part in their

effort. But by and large, the progress there has been very impressive given

where they were four-and-a-half, five years ago when the U.S. Consulate in

Jeddah was overrun, when their Ministry of Interior headquarters was blown

up, when the oil complex was threatened, and when thousands of western

workers were leaving because of concerns about the extremist threat.

ce response that they had is actually quite similar to the whole-ofgovernment approach that we used in the case of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Now, just a reminder of the components and the elements that are out

there: obviously, we’ve got the typical Army, Marine, Navy, and Air Force

components, two of these full time out in the [Persian] Gulf, two that split

their time between headquarters, although there are 70–80 percent out there.

cat’s a little bit less than, of course, the four-star commands in Iraq and in

Afghanistan. ce U.S. Forces–Afghanistan is obviously dual-hatted as

COMISAF [Commander of International Security Assistance Force]; then,

two-star SOCCENT [Special Operations Command Central] commander.

In addition to that, the two-star in Pakistan; two star, one star, one star in

Saudi Arabia; and a number of other flag officers in other organizations out

there because of the enormous ongoing security assistance efforts that are of

considerable importance. I think they actually loom larger and larger as we try
to build a network of networks as the regional security architecture, again

helped to some degree by the concerns about Iran’s activities.

Before we start the conversation, since it’s about leadership, consider

the metaphor—Mesopotamian stampede—for what we were trying to do

in Iraq.ce cattle in the drive are the tasks or the missions, and what you’re

trying to do is get them to Cheyenne, that completes that particular task or

mission. But, boy, it’s tough, and it’s raining sideways. A thunderbolt might

be an IED [improvised explosive device] going off. On the periphery of the

herd, we’re riding flat-out for glory, the handful of us that are outriders.

We’re all trying to keep the herd going. Some tasks—cattle—get out ahead

of you and you’ll catch up with those. Some will fall behind. If they’re

important, you go back and get them. ce point always is that leaders in

counterinsurgency have to be comfortable with a slight degree of discomfort,

of chaos almost, of the Mesopotamian stampede.

It’s a very complex endeavor often involving nonstandard tasks that

many of us, for the first twenty-five years of our careers, spent relatively

little time on. It’s been an enormous adjustment. I know that you’ve heard

a great deal about that from other speakers during the course of today.

cis is a great reminder of the kind of challenges that leaders face in what

was initially, in particular, a fairly uncomfortable endeavor.

Bernard Trainor, Lieutenant General, U.S. Marine Corps

(Retired): We went into Afghanistan to go after al-Qaeda. And we went

into Iraq and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] gave us fits for quite some time. You

alluded to the fact that al-Qaeda is down in Somalia, and Yemen remains

part of their nest also. How would you define al-Qaeda today, and how

would you describe its state of health?

Petraeus: I think al-Qaeda is diminished over where it was, say, certainly

several years ago. It is certainly diminished from where it was when we

launched the surge in early 2007, again, without question. I think that if you

look at what’s been done to al-Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal

Areas—and now I’m talking about al-Qaeda and transnational extremists in

particular—there’s been a diminution of their capabilities and assets.

cat doesn’t mean that we’re not tracking various threats. You saw that

there were some recent arrests made in the United States. It doesn’t mean

there are not alerts in some western European countries and careful tracking

of individuals in various locations in that area as well. It doesn’t mean there’s

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
not a link from al-Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula to al-Qaeda in East Africa

and then over to al-Qaeda in the Maghreb.

We can show and track the links within al-Qaeda. Now, showing and

being able to target or disrupt or ultimately defeat some of those elements

is another case. Often, again, that requires a bit more than just kinetic

activity. It also requires, as in the case of Iraq, where you have to actually

clear, hold, and build certain areas that were sanctuaries for al-Qaeda in

Iraq, and some of the Sunni extremist allies.

I think that is an assessment that has been shared by heads of, certainly, the

CIA [Central Intelligence Agency].ce past CIA director2 gave a little reported,

but major speech back in November-December last year that had a similar

assessment, and I think the community’s assessment is the same as well.

Unidentified: When the Obama administration did its original

Afghanistan-Pakistan review, did you and the military provide the

leadership and guidance of,“If you have the strategy, these are the resources

you’re going to need to fully implement it?”As you know, General [Charles

C.] Krulak says, if you want to have a fully resourced COIN

[counterinsurgency] strategy in Afghanistan, you’re going to need hundreds

of thousands of troops.

Petraeus: First, they don’t all have to be our troops and there’s a variety

of ways that you can come at those. Everyone talks about twenty

counterinsurgents per thousand and so forth. cose are in areas where you

obviously have a serious insurgency problem. In fact, the density of attacks

in Afghanistan is that more than two-thirds of the attacks occur in just

about 10 percent of the districts [Figure 5].

So obviously, one of the approaches has to be to concentrate effort in

those areas where the insurgency is most threatening the population and

where you also have the most people and where they most matter.

Back in the process that was carried out, the so-called Riedel Report

because it was led by Bruce Riedel—30-year CIA veteran, author of the

great book on al-Qaeda, among other things—I did participate. So did the

Joint Staff, so did a host of other folks.

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2 Gen Michael V. Hayden, USAF.
cis is where the insurgency is. cese hotspots right here, and for

what it’s worth, when we did our operations in Iraq in 2007, we did

similar density plots and focused on where the insurgency was. As folks

like Tom Ricks and Linda Robinson remember, the first joint security

stations [ JSSs] that we established to live with the population was one

of the big ideas: to secure the people, which you can only do by living

with them.ce first JSSs went into Amiriya and Dora, I think, and then

Ghazalia quickly thereafter. cey were the hottest of the hotspots in

Baghdad at that time.

In overlaying where our forces have been going, we can show how

the focus has been on Helmand Province and Kandahar, the original

wellspring of the Taliban. You can see some emergence of problems out

in Farah Province and Herat and then, a handful of other places in and

around Regional Command East with a bit up in the Kunduz area as

well. So again, that’s where you’ve got to focus.

ce president announced the strategy on the 27th of March. cere

are a number of documents that fed into that, in addition to the group

that assembled to help craft the Riedel Report. I was one of those,

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

Figure 5. SECURITY INCIDENTS BY DISTRICT: MARCH–AUGUST 2009
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Michèle Flournoy,3 and then a whole team

from the interagency and joint staff and a host of folks, many of whom I

think are in this room.

But they also could draw on the so-called Lute Report that was done

at the end of last year.cere also was a joint staff assessment in Afghanistan

and Pakistan. cen, in the study that was overseen by H. R. [McMaster],

there was a component of the CENTCOM strategic assessment that also

covered Afghanistan and Pakistan.

You may recall at the time we expected that there would be a form of

assessment that would take place sometime in the fall. cis may be a bit

earlier perhaps than we expected, but we’ve had some events like an election,

which, so far, does not appear that it is going to produce a government with

greater legitimacy in the eyes of the people, although it’s not done yet and

we need to give the Election Complaints Commission, the IEC

[Independent Election Commission] there, and others an opportunity to

work their way through that.

And so, there’s an assessment that has now come in as well that General

[Stanley A.] McChrystal submitted here. I think the resource options piece

will arrive in a few days as well.

But before that, we also had a civil-military planning conference.

Ambassador Holbrooke and I chaired that here in Washington, brought all

the players in from Afghanistan and Washington and those who were going

to go out, Ambassador [Karl W.] Eikenberry, for example. In fact, General

McChrystal was there as well. cey have now produced a civil-military

campaign plan that was one of the achievements of the month of July, the

tactical directive that General McChrystal refined. It was originally done by

General David McKiernan to reduce the level of civilian casualties—a

hugely important effort.

You cannot have what appeared to be tactical successes actually be

strategic setbacks because of the numbers of civilians killed.cose numbers

have been dramatically reduced by the very rigorous implementation of that

particular tactical directive, which provides guidance on the use of close air

support and other indirect fires.

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3 Under Secretary of Defense for Policy of the United States.
He’s also published a counterinsurgency guidance that is superb,

something similar to what we did in Iraq, and even—believe it or not—a

tactical driving directive. We were antagonizing the public with how we

drove in Afghanistan. cis is just one point in what General McChrystal

talked about when he highlighted the need to change our culture, of how we

operate so that it does not thrust the friendlies, the civilians, the neutrals,

into the arms of the Taliban by the actions that we take.

It’s instructive to show where our forces are because, with the density

plots shown earlier, this is what we’re doing [Figure 6]. As you know, the very

first group of troops were ordered by the Bush administration and then the

latter, 21,000 or so, by President Obama, taking us from somewhere around

30,000 to 31,000 overall at the beginning of the year to about 68,000 here

when this is said and done. ce additional enablers that were recently sent

over there will take us up to about that number with boots on the ground.

ce first element that went in was a brigade from the 10th Mountain

Division in the Wardak Logar area, one of the hotspots that we had to

contend with. We desperately needed helicopters, so a combat aviation

brigade went in and it, together with a Marine Expeditionary Brigade,

more than doubled the number of helicopters that are on the ground in

Afghanistan. Some of the enablers, using the authorities of a combatant

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Figure 6. SECURITY INCIDENTS BY DISTRICT: MARCH–AUGUST 2009
commander, that were just shifted and been in the process of shifting from

Iraq to Afghanistan will take that even a bit higher.

ce Marine Expeditionary Brigade is, I think, the largest brigade in our

history. It’s got every enabler and everything else you could ever want. It is

more than 10,000 strong and went into Helmand and has been working

with the U.K. Task Force–Helmand there. cere have been a number of

high-profile operations there that have seen some tactical gains, and some

are also operating in the Farah district of Herat Province.

ce next element, the Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, was a very

effective force in Iraq, as you will recall. In fact, they were so effective that we

sought to keep two of them there at all times, and we were generally successful

in doing that. One team has gone into Kandahar and areas around it, working

very closely in that case with Task Force–Kandahar from Canada.

cis is going to be very interesting to watch. It’s a significant endeavor

of using an advise-and-assist brigade, similar to the concept that we’ve

developed for Iraq and are just starting to implement there. It is essentially

a fourth brigade of the great 82nd Airborne Division augmented by a

substantial number of commissioned and noncommissioned officer leaders

above and beyond their authorization to enable them to do this advise-andassist mission, and overlay, generally, platoon-size elements on the army and

police elements in Regional Command South.

cis will substantially address the deficit in advisors that had existed

across the command. It will give a coherence to the effort—some sinews in

terms of command-and-control, logistics, and access to enablers—and

address issues that have sometimes plagued those elements.cis will be very

important to watch.

cen, of course, there are a number of efforts that we have undertaken

designed to help achieve greater unity of effort. cat’s been another key

theme of General McChrystal, but even before that, you’ll recall that dualhatted the COMISAF not long after I took over in Central Command. We

had to do that.

We have also addressed a number of other issues. We compared the

Afghanistan headquarters to the headquarters that we developed in Iraq

over time, which was truly optimized for the conduct of counterinsurgency

operations. It really was not much of a comparison.

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One of the major elements, although there are many other smaller

elements as well, is the creation of the so-called Intermediate Joint

Headquarters. cis is the headquarters that [Lieutenant] General [David]

Rodriguez will command, the core element is the U.S. Army, but it is a

NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] headquarters, and it will be

augmented very substantially by officers from all the different NATO nations.

A host of enablers has been sent in and others are still on the way. We

still need, frankly, to see the effect that they’ll achieve over time even as

there is a quite healthy discussion about their efficacy that is ongoing with

a considerable degree of intensity. cere are several multihour meetings,

for example, planned over the next two weeks with quite a significant

time commitment by our most senior leadership.

John Terrett, Al Jazeera English Television: Could you kindly speak

to the process of thinking through a change in strategy in Afghanistan

from the counterinsurgency measures that we’re taking now to the

protecting of the Afghan people, to one which is more slanted toward a

more distant approach, a more high-tech approach, and also brings in

Afghanistan? I can’t imagine who might ask you for your thoughts on that,

but if they were to ask you, what was the thinking of the strategy that one

would have to go through to get there?

Petraeus:cat’s another great attempt at an ambush, but to be truthful,

that is something that gets into the very predecisional nature of what we’re

doing right now. And obviously I endorsed—the chairman endorsed—those

who have been linked. I don’t think [this includes] General McChrystal’s

assessment and description, but to be candid, that’s not something that I

feel that we could share here today. My apologies.

Marisa Porges, Council on Foreign Relations: We’ve been speaking all

day about how to shift the focus so it’s the training, leadership, and everything

that’s primarily oriented to be effective at COIN. But there are obviously a lot

of other issues at play that aren’t necessarily on the front page every day, but

require attention. How does this wholesale shift in the focus of the Army,

Marine Corps, and military affect our engagement strategies on these other

issues and our ability to make headway on those problems?

Petraeus: We see them as very related. We tend to see, whatever the threat

or challenge is, enormous connections throughout the entire area of responsibility.

And we even, obviously, work across combatant command boundaries.

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To give you an example, we run secure video teleconferences that

may be co-hosted by the SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command]

commander and myself, JSOC [ Joint Special Operations Command]

command, maybe General [Douglas] Lute, or someone in the White

House, or John Brennan.4 But they will consist of the entire arena that

is out there. cat is just one example. We see layers of layers of different

tasks out there, but they all tend to reinforce one another.

So the regional security architecture may include substantial activities to

develop centers of excellence, for example, such as the United Arab Emirates

Gulf Air Warfare Center. For what it’s worth, their sixty Block 70 F-16s are

the most potent air force in the region, including that one to the east.

We have developed leaders who are capable of full-spectrum operations.

We opened up the aperture. I can address the process that we went through

in the Army to come to grips with this, and the other services did something

that was very similar as well.

cere was one huge idea. You know, we had big ideas before, and many

of you have seen me brief the counterinsurgency big ideas about securing

and serving the population, learning and adapting, fostering initiatives,

supporting reconciliation, and all the rest. But we’ve also had the really, really

big idea that all operations are some mix of offense, defense, and underlying

stability and support operations. Frankly, that was a pretty substantial idea

and we had not fully embraced it when we went into Iraq.

ce truth is that when we asked for some of those stability and support

enablers and other elements that were presumably available to help with

certain tasks, when the brigade commanders and I turned to each other and

said, “ce good news is we own Najaf, the bad news is we own Najaf,” they

were not readily available, nor did we have the kind of mindset that was

needed, but we were able to pretty rapidly develop over time.

FM 3-05 was huge. cat was the really big idea. From that cascaded

all of the others, counterinsurgency being just one campaign, or type of

operation, along a spectrum of conflict [Figure 7]. After that big idea, we

had to codify it in doctrine. cere is a series of doctrinal manuals done

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4 Assistant to President Obama for Homeland Security and Terrorism.

5 Field Manual (FM) 3-0 is the U.S. Army’s Operations manual, published in February 2008.
during that time, including the manual on leadership, which again

encompasses the kind of adaptive leaders that we’re talking about.

cen you have to educate your leaders, which we did throughout every

school and center in the entire U.S. Army. We completely overhauled these.

cere was one point at which the field artillery school commandant called and

said, “Sir, just thought you’d like to know we closed down the field artillery

officer advanced course two weeks ago.”I said,“Well, great.canks for telling

me. Good to hear it. Did you do it because you realized you needed to make

some of those changes that the captains and we all were talking about, those

guys who had been in Iraq?”And he said,“Yes. In fact we brought the captains

in and had them help us redesign the course. cey know more than in some

cases the instructors did about what they actually needed to focus on.”

I remember telling the Army chief of staff that afterwards. I sort of

broke it to him and said, “Hey, sir, probably just so you don’t hear it from

somewhere else, we closed down the advanced course.”He said,“Well, that’s

great.cere’s a couple of good things here. One is they did it.ce second is

they didn’t ask permission, so this is good initiative. And the third is they

didn’t ask for any money or people.”

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Figure 7. FM 3-0 OPERATIONS: FULL SPECTRUM OPERATIONS
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A Conversation with General David H. Petraeus

So, you’ve got to change. We changed everything. We changed the

combat training centers and where we do collective training from the “Clash

of the Titans” out in the central quarter of the National Training Center. In

the past we trained with pristine force-on-force kind of activities. Now we

engage in complex counterinsurgency operations with hundreds of native

speaking Iraqi or Afghan role-players. ce Afghan scenarios have moved up

into the mountains and a dozen villages or more look like Iraqi villages on the

floor of the desert. ce old activities are pretty much a thing of the past.

You next need a feedback mechanism, the lessons learned apparatus. In

this case, the Service Center for Army Lessons Learned. Each service has

one, plus there’s a joint one. cose lessons are fed back to every one of the

different elements so the big ideas can be refined, the curricula and seminars

adjusted, scenarios refined at the Combat Training Centers, and change

what you’re doing down range as required. All of this is enabled by

knowledge-management applications and virtual communities, which

themselves are enabled by huge pipes that allow us to share information in

real time, big data, and not have to do it in hard copy. ce goal is to be a

learning organization, and it is this right here that we’re after.

ce bottom element in every counterinsurgency guidance that we’ve

published has always been “learn and adapt.” Right above that, typically, is

“exercise initiative.” Coming back to where we started, a huge piece of this

is the idea that you’re not going to do just conventional military operations

as we used to know them where you attack, seize the high ground, plant the

flag, and go home to a victory parade. In fact, you’re going to engage in

something that will go back and forth from offense to defense, and will have

a component of stability and support.

I think there’s no better example of this, by the way, than the Battle of

Sadr City when the great Colonel John Hort, after having the biggest

armada of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets in all different

kinds of a really intense bit of fighting over the course of three or four weeks

or so, defeats the militia that completely collapses. Within an eight-hour

period his troops go from literally cheek-to-charging-handle to organizing

the reconstruction of the area of Sadr City southwest to Phase Line Gold.

cat is an example of troopers who get it, who can pivot, and really do

whatever it takes, whether it’s very high intensity at low-level combat or

very high-intensity stability and support operations.
cat’s probably getting at what you’re asking about, although we

obviously specialized to various degrees to ensure that we have people in

the right places who understand our very arcane and usually difficult foreign

military sales apparatus and security assistance procedures, and others who

are also cultural and language experts.

cere’s a huge ongoing effort—one of the other big insights out of the

strategic assessment that H. R. [McMaster] oversaw—that came out of the

intelligence arena. We realized that we did not have the kind of capacity,

the density, the sheer numbers of intelligence analysts and experts who could

at local levels, tell us a very important data point: who is reconcilable and

who is irreconcilable. ce great Derek Harvey, who heads our Center for

Excellence for Afghanistan and Pakistan at Central Command

headquarters, spurred the program.

One of the huge components in the way ahead is that you’ve got to

garner substantially more resources to push the Afghan National Security

forces to a much higher number.

Another component that has not been pursued significantly or

adequately so far is reintegration of reconcilables. It’s termed reintegration

in Afghanistan; in Iraq it was reconciliation. [British] Lieutenant General

Graeme Lamb, who is now retired, helped us stand this up in Iraq as the

deputy commander of MNF-I [Multi National Force–Iraq], together

with General McChrystal, who was then the JSOC commander. Lamb,

as a former director of the U.K.’s Special Forces, had a line into 22 Special

Air Service Regiment. We didn’t need deployment orders for their forces,

so they sent us what we needed.

We stood up the first force strategic engagement cell and, over time,

got the request-for-forces process going, and finally got them to

institutionalize the concept. We were then able to intellectually develop the

right and left limits and an azimuth that our leaders could then have

something to hang on to as we sought to exploit the developments in Anbar

province. cis came to be known as the Anbar Awakening over time. It

started in Ramadi around October 2006.

What we have now are leaders and troopers who get it, who are capable

in a host of different environments and can fight, can do stability and

support, and do all of that exceedingly well.

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Austin Long, Columbia University: We’ve talked a lot today about

building counterinsurgency leadership in Afghanistan and Iraq where we’ve

had a robust presence. Could you talk a little bit about how we do that in

parts of CENTCOM where you don’t have that robust presence? I’m

thinking of Pakistan, but also many of the other countries you mentioned.

Petraeus: cat is a wonderful question because what I was trying to

illustrate earlier is the idea that countering terrorism requires more than

counterterrorist forces, it requires a whole-of-governments

counterinsurgency mindset. It does not mean that those forces have to be

yours. And I think Pakistan is a great example of that.cere, the Pakistanis

are doing the fighting for which we are providing substantial assistance. I

think the numbers this year probably will be somewhere around perhaps

$1.5 or more billion in a variety of forms of support, equipment, Coalition

support funding, and the like.We’re helping to do some training-the-trainer

with superb Special Forces, and assisting in a variety of other areas, in

addition to the efforts on the embassy side in the civil arena supporting a

whole host of activities as well. But it’s the Pakistanis who are out there on

the front lines. Our assistance doesn’t go below brigade level. And again,

we are strictly in the mode of assisting where they want it. Most of this is

in the equipment, but there is some training of trainers and unit training.

cis is a case where we have relatively small numbers, but we’re able to

perform because we have functioning institutions.ce Pakistani military is

certainly a very robust and fully functioning institution with decades of

development under its belt.cis is unlike in Iraq where, after the dissolution

of the military and all the other actions that were taken, we literally had to

start from zero. cere was not even a ministry of defense building much

less a ministry of defense. We used the line that “we’re building the world’s

largest aircraft while in flight, while being shot at, and while we’re designing

it,” because that was the case. You had to get on with it. In particular, you

had to start developing infantry battalions in substantial numbers, but at

the same time you’re trying to develop the ministry level and work it out so

that the institutional elements would eventually mesh with what was

coming up from below as you formed battalions, brigade headquarters, some

division headquarters, and so on, to operational commands.

It’s arguable, I think, that the Iraqi security forces have taken on the

security tasks there. We are out of the cities with the exception of a handful

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of coordination centers in Basrah, Baghdad, and Mosul.Yes, there have been

some horrific incidents, particularly on 19 August. But, by-and-large, Iraqi

security forces have generally taken that on. So initially, we were having to

do virtually all of it, and now it’s a case where they are in the lead and, at

most, we are enabling or assisting.

ce operational tempo of their special operations forces has picked up;

this is something that was hugely important and a concern in the early days

after the 1 July change of us coming out of the cities.

Here’s what you see, and you all are familiar with it. It started over in

January 2004. Around the time the surge began, there were horrific levels

of loss of life in December 2006—fifty-three per day in Baghdad—just in

sectarian violence, and even more in some other categories, and we

wondered why they couldn’t get legislation. ce level of violence went up

when we began the surge of offensives. A lot of you in here who

participated in that remember us having to fight to take away those

sanctuaries to establish seventy-seven additional joint security stations just

in the Multi National Division–Baghdad area alone.

After that the level of violence started to come down. cere was also a

militia taking a knee.cat’s the “March madness,”as the troops called it, the

March and April 2008 battle for Sadr City and Basrah.

But more recently, for about seven or eight months or more, you see a

level of violence—when you talk about attacks this also includes attempted

attacks, IEDs found and cleared—somewhere around twenty attacks or so

a day. Obviously, a very substantial reduction from when there were more

than 160 attacks per day on average in certain weeks in June 2007.

Iraqi forces have picked that up. Do we have a number of concerns?

Absolutely. I mentioned some of them earlier. cere is still al-Qaeda and

other Sunni extremists, Shia elements, all of the political challenges and

other issues, and still a lot of legislation that we’d like to see.

But you know, it more than stumbles forward. cere’s progress in a

variety of areas. cere’s huge emotion about a lot of them, needless to say.

Even the Sons of Iraq, by the way, have all been paid.cey took two months

back pay before Ramadan and have now picked up, I think, to a total of

5,500 or so just in the past month in integrating Sons of Iraq onto payrolls

of elements in Baghdad. It’s never easy. Every payday is emotional. It’s all

hard all the time. But, again, there is pretty substantial progress.

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
Contrast that with a situation where you ultimately have some forces

and governance that’s seen as reasonably legitimate in the eyes of the bulk

of the population. Pakistan is, again, another case where we can enable them

rather than us having to do it.

On the other hand, you see Afghanistan, where governmental

institutions are still very nascent in some cases, challenged by corruption

and a variety of other ills that Prime Minister Karzai and others are the first

to recognize and admit. We’ll again have to see how this goes forward.

Ann Marlowe,Wall Street Journal andWeekly Standard: I have

a question about an unpopular group—the Afghan National Police. I would

like to get your response to a radical idea: remove them from the districts.

cey’re getting killed, I believe, at about a company rate per month. I’ve

heard the argument that they belong in the towns, but where people are

part of a homogenous tribe we would do better to rely on a tribal law, tribal

collective responsibility.

Petraeus:Yes. Actually in fact, one of the things that is being looked at

is the structure of the Afghan national security forces. It is no surprise that

when a situation gets difficult in a local area, those who are most vulnerable

right away are the local police because they live in the neighborhood. cey

are individuals. cey’re not units. cey don’t live on a base away from their

families. ceir families are vulnerable. cey are very much in harm’s way,

and they tend to be the first element that will collapse.

We saw that repeatedly in Iraq.cere were whole swaths in the country

as we launched the surge of offensives in the “triangle of death” south of

Baghdad and a number of other areas where there were virtually no Iraqi

security forces whatsoever and certainly no functioning police. I think there

were twenty in Yusufiyah when we tried to start recruiting and rebuilding.

We’ve requested several times—I personally have questioned and asked

CSTC-A [Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan]—the

training and equipping element, and General McChrystal has as well, to

really look hard at the structure.

Everybody is always happy because of the Focused District

Development program, but part of the reason that works is because you put

the Afghan National Civil Order Police [ANCOP] in when you take the

local police out for retraining. ce ANCOP are units, essentially

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paramilitary gendarmerie units, that arrive in battalions. cey’re not from

the neighborhood.cey’re not entangled by tribal loyalties.cey have a base

and can operate fairly freely without the kind of intimidation and

vulnerability experienced by local police. And typically, they’ll clean up the

area for a while.

When you put the Afghan National Police back in, you have to have

some elements there to back them up. Ultimately in Iraq, for example, we

had to develop substantial SWAT [Special Weapons and Tactics] teams,

Iraqi national police, and federal police after we reclaimed them from the

grip of the militia in the spring, summer, and fall of 2007. To give you an

idea of how challenging that particular effort was, the national police

commander, both division commanders, nine brigade commanders, and 70

percent of the battalion commanders had to be replaced.

So I think we have to take a very hard look at the architecture of the

Afghan national security forces. It may be that we have to do the same thing

we did in Iraq, where the first element that goes in is an army unit. Once the

area’s been cleared, perhaps then you work with local tribes in some fashion.

cere are some experiments with that, the Afghan Population

Protection program, in the Wardak Logar area. cere’s another initiative

that we’re experimenting with, a civil defense at local levels. But they have

to be tied back into something that has a link ultimately to the district and

the province, and ultimately to the national. cey can’t become just tribal

militias. So that is certainly something that folks are looking at.

ce ANP [Afghan National Police], as you rightly noted, are being

killed in substantial numbers. It’s staggering to see the numbers. By the way,

Iraqi security forces were typically losing their lives at a rate of at least three

times to those of ours, many of those police because they are the most

vulnerable. So you put your finger on a very good topic and it’s one that is

being looked at very, very hard, I can tell you.

Bob McMahon, Pennsylvania Veterans Museum: Many in the press

compare Iraq and Afghanistan with Vietnam. Could you address how the

shaping of your strategy and the lessons you learned about Vietnam maybe

going back to West Point—not everything since West Point, but just the

shaping of it?

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Petraeus: I think people have been right to say that Iraq is not Vietnam.

Afghanistan is not Vietnam. Each have their unique challenges. cere are

some similarities that you can always point to. In the case of Afghanistan,

you have the sanctuary problem. You had a little bit of that in Iraq as well.

cere are some similarities, but I think the biggest lesson of Vietnam is

not to become a prisoner of lessons that you may have learned in a very visceral

experience in the past. In my case, one of the challenges that I have and that

many others have who have all now gone to Afghanistan—and we’ve

assembled a real first-class team over there, we believe—is to make sure that

we’re not prisoners of our own experiences in Iraq and that we don’t try to

solve every problem in Afghanistan with the solution that worked in Iraq.

In fact, I’ve laid out at various times: here are the lessons that we learned,

here’s the counterinsurgency guidance that we employed and that worked

in Iraq, but you have a real “buyer-beware” with that that says, “You have to

apply this with extraordinary care and with real knowledge of the local

circumstances in which you are applying those lessons.”

Again, that’s something that was lacking at the beginning when we did

this strategic assessment. We did not have the depth and breadth and sheer

number of experts on local circumstances. If you cannot determine who the

irreconcilables are, if you can’t figure out who the reconcilables are, it’s

awfully hard to foster the concept of reintegration of reconcilables, and it’s

awfully hard to separate the irreconcilables from the population so that you

can indeed secure the population. So in that sense, I think what you really

have to do is try to shed all of the baggage from the past, using it where you

can. And there is the old saying that lessons of history can illuminate, but

they can also obfuscate.

My dissertation was on the lessons of history and the lessons of

Vietnam for the military, a lot having to do with the use of force and

advice and the character of that. But obviously you can’t do something

like that without also looking at the kinds of lessons that we learned about

trying to get the big ideas right for the time. I think that occasionally we

shot behind the target. cere are some real experts in counterinsurgency

application in this room. And arguably, the Marines and a number of

other elements at various times got it right, but then there would be other

units that were still doing a big war or we might be doing

counterinsurgency and they’re coming at you with the big war.

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You have to assess the character of what it is that you’re doing in a

very, very brutally forthright manner, very rigorous manner, so that you

have—to use the good old Joint Staff term—a “granular”understanding of

the situation at hand, and that’s hugely important. I think that’s probably

the big lesson.

Dr. Peter R. Mansoor, Ohio State University/Colonel, U.S. Army

(Retired): General, the one area of counterinsurgency leadership we’ve only

touched on here today is civilian leadership. I won’t ask you about anyone

currently serving in government, but I’m wondering if you could touch on

your relationship with Ambassador [Ryan C.] Crocker and with President

Bush. What made them such effective leaders in a counterinsurgency

environment during the surge period in 2007 and 2008.

Petraeus: First of all, Ryan Crocker was sent from central casting to be

the ambassador of Iraq. I forget how many embassies he’d been the chief of

mission for before, but I think it was six or so, and they were never garden

spots. It was Syria when they overran his residence, and Pakistan right before.

His reward for Pakistan was Iraq. He was in Lebanon in some pretty tough

moments. He did have Kuwait at a reasonably decent time. He was the

chargé d’affaires in Afghanistan in 2001, and as I recall, hoisted the flag. So

he really was an expert in the culture. He’d actually served in Baghdad before.

He truly was a student of what we were doing and had been through

this kind of stuff before. He was determined, as I was, that we were going

to achieve unity of effort. You’ll recall the civil-military campaign plan that

we developed.

ce first iteration of the plan was signed, I think, two days after he

arrived and all we did was just the first eighteen pages. cat’s all you need

to do.ce leaders out there don’t need a huge amount of guidance. If you say,

“Secure the people and do it by living with the population,” they got it, and

they’ll take and operationalize that.

Your job as a strategic leader is to get the big ideas right, communicate

them to the breadth and depth of your organization, oversee their

implementation—a lot of that by going out, walking on patrol but also

through a whole host of campaign reviews, even the daily battle updates—

and then capture the best practices and lessons.
On the second day, we’d already agreed the focus was going to be secure

the population and live with the people.cat was enough to solidify, frankly,

what was already happening in terms of establishment of Joint Security

Stations and some of the other ideas that were being implemented.

Cooperation was not optional. Crocker established that to the embassy.

I established it to the military. We built fusion cells. cere are limited

numbers of experts in civilian agencies. At one point, we had to take down

the deputy minister of health. So we’re trying now to help the remaining

deputy minister of health who’s left and discover there is only one health

attaché—one. cis is for an entire ministry of health for a huge country.

We looked at some of our assets, and in light of a reduction in casualties,

find we had a little bit of excess capacity.We asked her,“How would you like

to be helped by several doctors, a handful of supervisory nurses, some

hospital administrators, and medical logisticians and maybe a security force

to go with all that and a handful of up-armored Humvees?”Needless to say,

those augments were accepted, but she was the lead and was terrific.

We did the same thing with the energy fusion cell, the election fusion

cell, and a number of others. So I think that is a model for what has to be

done.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, I,

and others have all been on the Hill [Capitol Hill] saying we’re the biggest

champions of more spending for [the Department of ] State. But there’s a

limit to how much you are going to develop, and the local population is not

going to come as squads, platoons, and battalions with transportation ability

to secure themselves, communication, and all the rest. So I think the

partnerships that were developed in Iraq are being strengthened in

Afghanistan because there is an increase in the civilian numbers there to go

along with the substantial increase in military numbers.

Obviously there was a real focus on Iraq.cere’s no question that it was

the main effort and we were pretty much able to build a team of first-rate

folks.cat’s why I brought you back over there with me to be the exec,6 and,

you know, H. R. [McMaster], we were able to build on what was already a

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6 From February 2007 to May 2008, then-Colonel Mansoor was General Petraeus’s executive officer

in Iraq.
very good team. As folks rotated we also got some terrific people and were

able to make sure they were all in the right place and to move forward.

More important, I think was building or helping the Iraqis build their

team. I’m not certain how much you talked about that. Someone spoke

earlier about replacement of various leaders, but the fact is that that

government—you have to recognize that Prime Minister Maliki was

selected—his strength was his weakness in the eyes of those who elected

him. cey did not want to elect a strong leader. cey all wanted to elect

someone they thought they could have their way with. And the fact of the

matter was that he became very strong.

He became so strong that there was a point at which I came back and

told Ambassador Crocker,“Hey, Ryan, good news is Prime Minister Maliki

has just made a really tough decision. ce bad news is he’s made a really

tough decision and forces are starting to move to Basrah tomorrow.”But, by

golly, that actually ended up being a tactical engagement that had a real

strategic effect on the situation in Iraq and also solidified his position.

So again, there’s just a lot of engagement, as you well recall, and I think

that partnership there was something that rippled all the way down and to

a degree rippled all the way up as well.

Colonel Larry Strobel, U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability

Operations Institute: We’ve talked a lot today about being critical on

military leadership. We do that very well and we get better because of that.

How can our civilian organizations—whether they be interagency, national,

international—improve their leadership to the current COIN operation so

we can achieve success?

Petraeus: cere was a period where the engine of change actually

guided what we did in the Army [Figure 8]. ce Combined Arms Center

at Fort Leavenworth oversaw all the different gears on that particular engine.

cis included oversight of doctrine; education of commissioned,

noncommissioned, and warrant officer leaders; scenarios of the combat

training center for lessons learned; and even the battle command knowledge

system, which enabled knowledge management.

cere was an interagency conference that discussed how we develop

greater counterinsurgency expertise in the rest of government, and we

proposed an interagency engine of change. It starts with some big ideas and

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then you’ve got provide the education. cere is an education center at the

State Department where they do counterinsurgency. [Ambassador] is that

not true, that they have now instituted essentially counterinsurgency

stability and support operations instructions out there?

Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann: Yes. It is slow. President [George

W.] Bush authorized this stabilization and reconstruction force. It was

essentially on life support until last year’s budget, but is now hiring and

moving.cere are still a lot of pieces that are going to have to go. As you’ve

had with some of your efforts, the length of time from idea to concept to full

up, it is going to take a while. We’ve got new authorities. cey’re hiring—

these numbers sound laughable to you but they’re big to us—I think they’re

hiring either 1,200 or 1,300 state officers over attrition this year, where the

last few years we didn’t hire any. We’re hiring at the bottom, our version of

second lieutenants.

Petraeus: cey can be strategic lieutenants, though, as you know.

Neumann:cey could be strategic lieutenants, but they’re not going to

be O-3s and O-4s [captains and majors] for a while. cere’s a lot of

movement but you won’t feel a whole lot of effect for a while.

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Figure 8. U.S. ARMY ENGINE OF CHANGE
Petraeus: cere’s also an initiative at Arlington at your State

Department Training Center there, which has also established an

interagency counterinsurgency center. In addition, obviously, there’s

experience, but there also has to be education.

ce challenge for the State Department has always been, if your

numbers are never adequate to the overall tasks that are out there, how do

you break someone out for one of these, out of their intellectual comfort

zone experiences that we talk about? And I’m sure you’ve had that

discussion here about the importance of those kinds of experiences.

It doesn’t matter to me what it is. Grad school was it for a lot of us,

where you go and realize that the huge debates you thought you were having

at the staff college were in a spectrum about like this.cen you go to civilian

grad school and realize there are some seriously bright people who are all the

way out over here or all the way out over there, and by the way, they have

some reasonable assumptions that undergird their intellectual positions.

So those intellectual, out-of-your-comfort-zone experiences are of

enormous importance in the development of leaders who can take on these

kinds of tasks. When you send a State Department official to one of our

staff or war colleges, I think that’s probably an out-of-their-intellectualcomfort-zone experience as well, but trying to break them free to do

that—and I can affirm that, having gone to State and asked if they could

send more people to some of the courses that we oversaw when I was at

Fort Leavenworth—is the challenge.

Jerry Lynes, Director for Operational Plans and Joint Force

Development for the Joint Chiefs of Staff ( J-7): Sir, you know the U.S.

government has put out a DoD [Department of Defense], State Department,

and USAID [United States Agency for International Development]

government guide for COIN. And I’m told U.S. Institute of Peace is going to

put out doctrinal guidance for stabilization and reconstruction.

Petraeus:cese are the big ideas that are hugely important.cere were

some others as well.cere were some underpinnings already if you go all the

way back to [President Bill Clinton’s May 1997] PDD 56 [Managing

Complex Contingency Operations] and some others.

Unknown: Sir, certainly you were one of the drivers of the engine of

change for a number of years at [the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center]

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
and as the principal customer of force development. ce institution has

come a long way in preparing its individuals and its units for the COIN

fight. From your position, as the ultimate customer, as our principal joint

warfighter right now, what needs to be done with more urgency? What

emphasis needs to be changed? What have we not quite got right?

Petraeus: ce fact is that there are a number of still very high-demand,

low-density skill areas that we have to fix. So, there’s a lot of structural pieces still.

For example, I sent a memo to the chiefs of staff of the Army and the

Air Force and asked for help with developing more JTACs, Joint Tactical

Area Controllers.cere is a big shortage of those out there, especially as we

now proliferate security teams out there in platoon sizes, and special forces

teams need the JTACs from the conventional side of the house. cere’s a

host of other examples of that in the electronic warfare and information

operations fields.

Some real structural gaps still exist in areas that weren’t all that

mainstream or that important, or even if you had them on your books, you

never filled the electronics warfare officer.cat was the last person who ever

shows up. If you really have 100 percent, then maybe you fill that particular

billet. All of a sudden, when you’re doing various serious forms of electronic

warfare, that’s very important.

cere are big capabilities that are lacking. As you look at the whole

cyber command issue, as you look at the issue of cyberspace—it’s a

battleground. It cannot be uncontested. ce enemy cannot have free reign

out in cyberspace any more than they can have free reign or a sanctuary in

some physical geographic location.

cen, there are skill sets that we want to see more of in of our

individuals, and that includes languages and obviously cultural expertise.

Arguably, I think we built this in Iraq, but we built it the old-fashioned way,

by sending people back again and again and again in substantial numbers.

When you’re in your third or fourth tour over there, you start to understand

the nuances of it, even if you haven’t really picked up the language yet. But

you gain a real sense of how things operate, how systems are supposed to

work, how they really work, and all the rest of that. We have to gain that in

places like Afghanistan and Pakistan in much, much greater numbers.

177

A Conversation with General David H. Petraeus
So building that expertise, that’s really also about the road to

deployment. We also overhauled the road to deployment. Believe it or not,

we were into—I think it was late 2005—I just asked, “Hey, how have we

updated the seminar that we conduct at the beginning of the road to

deployment?” It turned out that we were still teaching combat in cities that

late in this exercise. So we said, “Stop. You’re going to do a

counterinsurgency seminar. We’re going to start it next month. I don’t care

what shape it’s in. It will be better than doing combat in cities.”cey said,

“Great! Hooah!” We got after it and started that.

cat kind of overhaul—you’re constantly adjusting it—that’s the real

key, especially now as the Army becomes a lot more like the Marine Corps,

Navy, and Air Force, where the brigade combat team is the centerpiece and

you are almost treating those the way you treat aircraft battle groups or

MEUs [Marine Expeditionary Units] as they’re generated. cat’s another

area on which we have to focus.

I do think that we have leaders who have demonstrated flexibility and

adaptability. cere are concerns at times, some of which I think are valid,

that some of the technical expertise of some of our war fighting functions

isn’t what it used to be. For instance, we haven’t massed battalions of artillery

lately and we need to do some of that.

As we get the dwell time, for example, in the Army and in the Marine

Corps in particular, some of these skills can be brought back.cen you focus

during the final, say nine to twelve months of preparation on those skills

that you actually need for the area to which you’re going to go. As we’ve

expanded, end strength and recruiting is going real well and retention is

quite good. We’ve been able to build that up and start to implement that

kind of program.

I was just talking to a brigade commander, for example, that the 101st

Airborne Division is not deploying—not on the patch chart, as they say—

for quite a while, and yet he has very substantial amount of strength of his

forces, so he can really do the kind of stuff that was envisioned as the Army

developed the force-generation model.

I come at it in terms of functions, tasks, and some expertise that we

need to refine for the kinds of environments that we’re going to. I think the

key is this road to deployment, this preparation of forces, as we line them up

against various locations and making sure they make sense. Recently we

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Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
made a change and put the 173rd Airborne Brigade on the patch chart for

Afghanistan, which is where it was last time, rather than Iraq, which is

where it was slated to go. Another unit that had been in Iraq was scheduled

for Afghanistan, but it’s been reassigned to Iraq.

We’ve tried to facilitate this process as well as the Afghanistan-Pakistan

Hands program.cis program identified a substantial number of slots with

critical expertise requirements in the headquarters and elements that

support them in the two countries. We rotate the experts through these

slots. ce Center of Excellence at CENTCOM will be one of those as we

go forward.

179

A Conversation with General David H. Petraeus

Contributors

Colonel Julian Dale Alford, USMC

Colonel Julian Dale Alford was commissioned as a second lieutenant in

the Marine Corps in December 1987. He commanded a rifle platoon during

Operation Just Cause and a mortar platoon during Operations Desert

Shield and Desert Storm. In 1997, he received the Leftwich Trophy.

Deploying to Afghanistan in May 2004 in support of Operation Enduring

Freedom, he commanded the 3d Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. In

August 2005, he took this battalion to western Iraq. Colonel Alford

attended the Amphibious Warfare School, and was a distinguished graduate

at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College. After completing the

Marine Corps War College in June 2007, he served on the faculty of the

Marine Corps Command and Staff College. His next assignment was as a

Joint Ground Operations Officer with the Institute for Defense Analyses in

the Joint Advanced Warfighting Division. He is currently the commanding

officer of ce Basic School.

Lieutenant General David W. Barno, USA (Ret)

Lieutenant General David W. Barno, USA (Ret), was commissioned as

an infantry officer from the United States Military Academy in 1976. He

also holds a Master of Arts degree in national security studies from

Georgetown University, and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and

General Staff College and the U.S. Army War College. General Barno has

served in a variety of command and staff positions in the continental United

States and around the world. He has commanded at all levels from

lieutenant to lieutenant general, in peacetime and combat operations. He

served as overall U.S. and Coalition commander in Afghanistan from 2003–

05. He commanded over 20,000 U.S. and Coalition forces as part of

Operation Enduring Freedom, with responsibilities across Afghanistan,

Pakistan, and portions of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. From 2006 until 2010

he served as Director of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic

Studies at the National Defense University. He is currently a Senior Advisor

and Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

181
Paula D. Broadwell

Paula D. Broadwell is a Research Associate at Harvard University’s

Center for Public Leadership. She previously served as the Deputy Director

of the Fletcher School’s Jebsen Center for Terrorism Studies. Ms. Broadwell

has held military assignments in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

She has served multiple tours with an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, the

Defense Intelligence Agency, and U.S. Special Operations Command, and

in other strategic and tactical positions in the Army. At present, Ms.

Broadwell serves on the Executive Board of Women in International

Security and contributes to the Project on National Security Reform

“Leadership Development” working group. She has a BS from the United

States Military Academy, as well as an MPA from Harvard and an MA in

international security from the University of Denver. She recently

completed Army Command and General Staff College, and is now a PhD

candidate at the University of London. She is writing her dissertation on

transformational military leadership.

James M. Caiella

James M. Caiella, an editor for Marine Corps University Press, earned

his master’s degree in communications from Syracuse University’s

Newhouse School of Public Communications in 1981. A photojournalist

with 30 years newspaper and magazine experience, he was senior editor of

Proceedings and Naval History magazines of the U.S. Naval Institute.

Dr. Eliot A. Cohen

Eliot Cohen is the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at

the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns

Hopkins University, and founding Director of the Philip Merrill Center for

Strategic Studies there. His books include Supreme Command: Soldiers,

Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime and (with John Gooch) Military

Misfortunes:Qe Anatomy of Failure in War. He directed the U.S. Air Force’s

official study of the 1991 Gulf War, and has served on a variety of

government advisory boards, including the Defense Policy Board. During

2007–09, he served as Counselor of the Department of State. He received

a PhD in political science from Harvard University and was previously a

professor at Harvard University and the U.S. Naval War College.

182

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
Brigadier General W. Blake Crowe, USMC

Brigadier General W. Blake Crowe is currently assigned as the Deputy

Commander, United States Forces–Japan. General Crowe’s military

education includes Marine Corps Command and Staff College

(nonresident) and CMC Fellowship at Rand Corporation. His command

and staff positions include command of Kilo Company, 3d Battalion, 9th

Marines, during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm; command of

1st Force Reconnaissance Company, Direct Action Platoon, during 13th

Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) deployment and

Desert Storm ceasefire agreement; command of 3d Battalion, 4th Marines;

AC/S G-3 Training and Education Command from July 2003 to June

2005; and command of 7th Marine Regiment, Twentynine Palms,

California, from July 2005 to June 2007. He deployed to western al-Anbar,

Iraq, as commander of Regimental Combat Team 7 from January 2006 to

February 2007. From July 2007 to August 2008, he commanded Marine

Barracks, Washington, DC. From August 2008 to June 2010, he served as

Principal Director, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and

Southeast Asia, Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Nathaniel C. Fick

Nathaniel C. Fick is the Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a

New American Security. Prior to joining the center, Fick served as a Marine

Corps infantry officer, with combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. He

served in 2007 as a civilian instructor at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency

Academy in Kabul. Mr. Fick is the author of the 2005 New York Times

bestseller One Bullet Away, recognized as one of the “Best Books of the

Year” by the Washington Post. He is a member of the Council on Foreign

Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and serves on

the boards of the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation and the

Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College. He holds an

AB degree with high honors in classics from Dartmouth, an MPA in

international security policy from the Kennedy School of Government at

Harvard, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

183

Contributors
Colonel David J. Furness, USMC

Colonel David J. Furness currently serves as the commanding officer of

the 1st Marine Regiment. His previous assignment was as Director, Marine

Corps Legislative Liaison, U.S. House of Representatives at Headquarters

Marine Corps, Office of Legislative Affairs. Colonel Furness’s military

education includes Marine Corps Command and Staff College (resident);

the School of Advanced Warfighting; and graduation from the Naval War

College. His command positions have included rifle platoon commander;

81mm mortar platoon commander; rifle company commander;

commanding officer of Marine Corps Recruiting Station, Sacramento,

California; and commanding officer of 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. From

December 2004 to June 2005, he deployed to the United States Central

Command Area of Responsibility as the commanding officer of Battalion

Landing Team 1/1, the Ground Combat Element of the 15th Marine

Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable), and participated in

Operation Unified Assistance and Operation Iraqi Freedom III in south

Baghdad, Iraq. From 20 January to 18 August 2006, he deployed as

Commanding Officer, Task Force 1/1, Regimental Combat Team 5, in

support of Operation Iraqi Freedom 05-07.1, operating principally in the

cities of Karmah and western Baghdad, Iraq.

Dr. Jeffrey Gedmin

Dr. Jeffrey Gedmin was named President and Chief Executive Officer

of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on 2 February 2007. Prior to this, Dr.

Gedmin was Director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, and before that, he

was a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington,

DC. He is the author of the book Qe Hidden Hand: Gorbachev and the

Collapse of East Germany (1992). His articles on U.S. foreign policy and

American public diplomacy have appeared in leading U.S. and European

publications, including the Financial Times, New York Times, Washington

Post, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, and London Times. Dr. Gedmin

holds a PhD in German Area Studies and Linguistics from Georgetown

University. He earned a master’s degree in German area studies (literature

concentration) and a BA in music from American University in

Washington, DC.

184

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
Colonel Jeffrey M. Haynes, USMC

Colonel Jeffrey M. Haynes, USMC, is a graduate of the Amphibious

Warfare School, Marine Corps Command and Staff College, and Air War

College. In November 2007, Colonel Haynes assumed duties as

Commanding Officer, Regional Corps Advisor Command 3-5 (RCAC 3-

5), consisting of 150 Marines and sailors. In February 2008, RCAC 3-5

deployed to Afghanistan. Once in country, RCAC 3-5 expanded to include

twenty-two Embedded Training Teams made up of 700 personnel from six

contributing nations. cese teams advised elements of the 201st Corps,

Afghan National Army, during the planning and execution of combat

operations in eastern Afghanistan. Colonel Haynes also functioned as the

advisor to the Commanding General, 201st Corps. During 2008, 201st

Corps conceived and executed a holistic counterinsurgency campaign in the

Tagab valley, a longtime insurgent stronghold. He is currently Assistant

Chief of Staff, Marine Forces Pacific.

Colonel William M. Jurney, USMC

Colonel William M. “Bill” Jurney enlisted in the Marine Corps as an

active duty infantryman in 1987, earning his commission through the

Enlisted Commissioning Program. He is currently Chief of Staff for

Logistics at Marine Forces Command. Before assuming this position, he

was assigned as the Chief, Plans and Future Operations Division, U.S. Joint

Forces Command. He served as the Commanding Officer, 1st Battalion,

6th Marines, 2d Marine Division, deploying the battalion twice in support

of Operation Iraqi Freedom—first in March 2005 to Fallujah, Iraq, and

again in August 2006 to Ramadi, the capital city of al-Anbar Province.

Other operational tours include service with the 22d MEU in support of

Operation Sharp Edge, Monrovia, Liberia; Operations Desert Shield and

Desert Storm; two independent company deployments to Port-au-Prince,

Haiti, in support of Operation Uphold Democracy; a deployment with the

26th MEU in support of Operations Allied Force (Adriatic), Shining Hope

(Albania), Joint Guardian Initial Entry Forces (Kosovo), and Avid

Response (Turkey).

185

Contributors
Robert D. Kaplan

Robert D. Kaplan is a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American

Security in Washington, DC, and a national correspondent for the Atlantic.

He is the bestselling author of twelve books on international affairs and

travel, which have been translated into many languages. His Balkan Ghosts

was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the “best books”

of 1993, and by Amazon.com as one of the best travel books of all time.Qe

Arabists,Qe Ends of the Earth,An Empire Wilderness,Eastward to Tartary,

and Warrior Politics were all chosen by the New York Times as “notable”

books of the year.ce Wall Street Journal named Qe Arabists as one of the

best five books written about America’s historical involvement in the Middle

East. Kaplan’s essays have appeared on the editorial pages of the New York

Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.

Clare Lockhart

Clare Lockhart is cofounder and Director of the Institute for State

Effectiveness, which focuses on enhancing the relationships between the

state, global, and local financial markets and civil society in unstable states.

ce institute is currently working with a wide variety of governments and

political leaders. Ms. Lockhart is the author of Fixing Failed States with

Ashraf Ghani and has written widely in the press, including in the Financial

Times, Prospect, Europe’s World, Spectator, Washington Post, and Slate. She

has also appeared on radio and television, including Charlie Rose, NPR, and

the BBC’s Today and World Service. From 2001 through 2005, Ms.

Lockhart was United Nations Adviser to the Bonn Agreement in

Afghanistan, then was seconded to the Afghan Government. Living in

Kabul, she stewarded numerous governmental initiatives. Subsequently, she

was called on to advise the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

International Security Assistance Force on a range of processes. She has

degrees from Oxford and Harvard.

186

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
Dr. Peter R. Mansoor, USA (Ret)

Dr. Peter R. Mansoor, Colonel, USA (Ret), is the General Raymond

E. Mason, Jr., Chair of Military History at Ohio State University. He

assumed this position in September 2008 after a 26-year career in the U.S.

Army that culminated in his service as the executive officer to General

David Petraeus, the commanding general of Multi National Force–Iraq.

Colonel Mansoor commanded the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, in

Iraq in 2003–04; was the founding Director of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps

Counterinsurgency Center in 2006; and served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff

“Council of Colonels” that reexamined the strategy for the Iraq War. Dr.

Mansoor is the author of Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War

in Iraq, an account of his brigade’s operations and the difficulties of the U.S.

war in Iraq during the crucial first year of the conflict.

Brigadier General H. R. McMaster, USA

Brigadier General H. R. McMaster is currently the Deputy to the

Commander for Planning at International Security Assistance Forces

headquarters in Afghanistan. General McMaster’s military education

includes the Combined Arms and Services Staff School, Command and

General Staff College, and a U.S. Army War College fellowship at the

Hoover Institution. His command and staff positions include command of

Eagle Troop, Second Squadron, during Operations Desert Shield and Desert

Storm; command of the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry; Director, Commander’s

Advisory Group at U.S. Central Command from May 2003 to May 2004;

command of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Carson, Colorado

(which included a one-year combat mission in Iraq); and Senior Research

Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London from

July 2006 until June 2008. During that time, he also served in Iraq as Special

Assistant to Commander, Multi National Force–Iraq. From 2008 until 2010,

he was Director of Concept Development and Experimentation at the Army

Capabilities Integration Center.

187

Contributors
Dr. Mark Moyar

Dr. Mark Moyar is currently Director of Research at Orbis Operations.

Before accepting this position, he was Professor of National Security Affairs

at the Marine Corps University, where he taught at its component schools,

including the Command and Staff College and the War College. His most

recent book is A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil

War to Iraq, published in September 2009. He has also written two books

on the Vietnam War: Triumph Forsaken:Qe Vietnam War, 1954–1965 and

Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in

Vietnam. Triumph Forsaken is one of the most-discussed histories of the

past decade and has been the subject of an academic conference and the

book Triumph Revisited: Historians Battle for the Vietnam War (2010). Dr.

Moyar’s writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post,

Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He received a BA summa

cum laude from Harvard and a PhD from Cambridge.

Major General Robert B. Neller, USMC

Major General Robert B. Neller was commissioned as a Marine officer

through the Platoon Leaders Class program in May 1975. He is a graduate

of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, the Armed Forces Staff

College, and the NATO Defense College, and has participated in a wide

variety of military operations. As Commanding Officer, Marine Corps

Security Force Company, Panama, he participated in Operations Just Cause

and Promote Liberty. He commanded the 3d Light Armored Infantry

Battalion and deployed to Somalia in support of Operation Restore Hope.

In September 2005, he was assigned as the Deputy Commanding General

(Operations), I Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward), and deployed to

Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom from February 2006 to

February 2007. Major General Neller served as Commanding General, 3d

Marine Division, from June 2007 to August 2009 and transitioned to

President, Marine Corps University, and Commanding General, Education

Command, on 4 September 2009. In December 2010, he was promoted to

lieutenant general and assumed duties as Director of Operations, Joint Staff.

188

Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond
General David H. Petraeus, USA

General David H. Petraeus is a graduate of the United States Military

Academy and the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. After

earning MPA and PhD degrees in International Relations from Princeton

University, he served as an Assistant Professor of International Relations at

the U.S. Military Academy. General Petraeus has held leadership positions

in airborne, mechanized, and air assault infantry units in Europe and the

United States. In 2003, he commanded the 101st Airborne Division (Air

Assault) for the first year of Operation Iraqi Freedom. General Petraeus

then became the first commander of the Multi National Security Transition

Command–Iraq. Returning to Fort Leavenworth in 2005, he commanded

the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center. At the beginning of 2007, he

returned to Iraq as the Commanding General, Multi National Force–Iraq,

and remained in that position until assuming command of the United States

Central Command in October 2008. On 4 July 2010, he assumed command

of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization International Security Assistance

Force and U.S. Forces–Afghanistan.

Thomas E. Ricks

comas E. Ricks is the author of Fiasco: Qe American Military

Adventure in Iraq, which was a number one New York Times bestseller and

a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. His second book on that war, Qe

Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in

Iraq, 2006–2008, was published in February 2009, and also became a New

York Times bestseller. His previous book, Making the Corps, won the

Washington Monthly’s “Political Book of the Year” award. A correspondent

for many years at the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, he has been

a member of two Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting teams. He currently is

a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a contributing

editor at Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the blog Qe Best

Defense. He grew up in New York and Afghanistan, and graduated magna

cum laude from Yale in 1977.

189

Contributors
Counterinsurgency Leadership in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Beyond

190

Dr. Nicholas J. Schlosser

Nicholas J. Schlosser earned his doctorate in history from the University

of Maryland in 2008, and has worked as a historian with the Marine Corps

History Division since 2009. His research examines the U.S. Marine Corps

during Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as the Marine Corps’involvement

in irregular warfare and counterinsurgencies. He is the editor of the volume

U.S. Marines in Iraq, 2004–2008: Anthology and Annotated Bibliography.

Dr. Amin Tarzi

Dr. Amin Tarzi is the Director of Middle East Studies at Marine Corps

University. Prior to this, Dr.Tarzi covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for Radio

Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Regional Analysis team. Dr. Tarzi has also

taught at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies and worked at the Center

for Nonproliferation Studies, the Saudi Arabian Mission at the United

Nations, and the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research. Dr.

Tarzi is the author of numerous book chapters, articles, and commentaries

on Afghanistan and the Middle East, and appears regularly on radio and

television. He earned his PhD and MA degrees from the Department of

Middle East Studies at New York University. His latest works are Taliban

and the Crisis in Afghanistan, co-edited with Robert D. Crews (Harvard

University Press, 2008), and Qe Iranian Puzzle Piece: Understanding Iran in

the Global Context (Marine Corps University Press, 2009).
Contributors

191

Francis J. “Bing” West

Francis J. “Bing” West served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for

International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration. A graduate of

Georgetown and Princeton Universities, he served in Marine infantry units

in Vietnam. Based on his experiences in Vietnam, he produced two books:

Small Unit Action in Vietnam and Qe Village. A frequent visitor to Iraq and

Afghanistan, he has written three books on Iraq, most recently,Qe Strongest

Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq. His books have won the

Marine Corps Heritage Prize and the Colby Award for Military History,

and have appeared on the U.S. Marine Corps Commandant’s Reading List.

West is a correspondent for the Atlantic and appears regularly on the

NewsHour and Fox News. He has also been Vice President of the Hudson

Institute, Dean of Research at the Naval War College, and an analyst at the

Rand Corporation.

Colonel John K. Wood, USA (Ret.)

Colonel John K. Wood, USA (Ret.), is a member of the faculty and was

formerly the Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan Coordination at the

Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies. Prior to joining the

center, he served as the Senior Director for Afghanistan for the National

Security Council under both the George W. Bush and Obama

administrations. He retired as a colonel after serving 28 years in the United

States Army. He served in the Pentagon as the Assistant Deputy Director

for Politico-Military Affairs–Asia on the Joint Staff, and his previous

military assignments included both command and staff billets in Korea,

Europe, and the United States. From 2002 to 2003 he was the Military

Assistant to the Acting Secretary of the Army. He holds a bachelor’s degree

from the U.S. Military Academy, as well as masters’degrees from the Naval

Postgraduate School and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at

National Defense University. He is a graduate of the Combined Arms and

Services Staff School and the Command and General Staff College.
192
Appendix

Acronyms and Abbreviations

AFRICOM U.S. Africa Command

ANA Afghan National Army

ANCOP Afghan National Civil Order Police

ANP Afghan National Police

AO Area of Operations

AOR Area of Responsibility

AQI al-Qaeda in Iraq

BBC British Broadcasting Corporation

CENTCOM U.S. Central Command

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CNN Cable News Network

COIN counterinsurgency

COMISAF Commander of International Security Assistance Force

CSTC-A Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan

DC direct commission

DoD U.S. Department of Defense

ECC Electoral Complaints Commission

EPRT Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team

ETT Embedded Training Team

FOB forward operating base

GAO U.S. Government Accountability Office

H and S Headquarters and Service

193
IEC Independent Election Commission

IED improvised explosive device

ISAF International Security Assistance Force

JAG Judge Advocate General

JSOC Joint Special Operations Command

JSS joint security station

MEF Marine Expeditionary Force

MEU Marine Expeditionary Unit

MNFI Multi National Force–Iraq

MRAP mine resistant ambush protected vehicle

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NCO noncommissioned officer

NGO nongovernmental organization

OCS Officer Candidate School

OEMA Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis

OP observation post

PFC private first class

PME professional military education

PRT Provincial Reconstruction Team

PsyOps Psychological Operations

RC Regional Command

RCT regimental combat team

ROE rules of engagement

ROTC Reserve Officer Training Corps

RPG rocket-propelled grenade

194
SIGACTS significant acts

SOCCENT Special Operations Command Central

SOCCOM U.S. Special Operations Command

SOF Special Operations Forces

SSI Strategic Studies Institute

SWAT Special Weapons and Tactics

TBS ce Basic School

UN United Nations

UNAMA United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan

USAID United States Agency for International Development

USMA United States Military Academy

XO executive officer

195

Appendix • Acronyms and Abbreviations
196
A

“A Boy Named Sue,” 104

Afghanistan, Islamic Republic of, 3, 10

army. See Afghan National Army

conflict characterization, 4

governance, 135

Interior Ministry, 12

Islamic country, 140

situation in, 113–14

Afghan Border Police, 69, 73

Afghan National Army (ANA), 12, 115,

117, 123–30, 136, 140

201st Corps, 4

3d Brigade, 125–26

1st Battalion, 135

Afghan National Civil Order Police, 169

Afghan National Party, 140

Afghan National Police (ANP), 169–70

Afghan national security forces, 136, 166,

169–70

Afghan National Development Strategy, 117

AFRICOM. See U.S. Africa Command

aid workers, 20

Alford, Colonel Julian Dale (USMC), 52,

104, 142

al-Houthi, 154

Al Iraqiya, 41

Al-Jabouri, General Najim Abed, 30

Al Jazeera, 41, 162

Allawi, Iyad, 10

Allen, Major General Terry de la Mesa

(USA), 106

alliance relationships, 3, 23

al-Maliki, Nouri, 174

al-Qaeda, 40, 105, 112–13, 120, 144, 151,

153–56, 168

Arabian Peninsula, 154, 157

East Africa, 154, 157

in Iraq, 156

Maghreb, 157

al-Sadr, Muqtada, 44

Amiriya, Iraq, 158

ANA. See Afghan National Army

al-Anbar Awakening, 67, 166

al-Anbar Province, Iraq, 52, 60

ANCOP. See Afghan National Civil Order

Police

ANP. See Afghan National Police

Arabian Peninsula, 150, 154

Atmar, Mohammad Hanif, 12

B

Baghdadi, Iraq, 52

Barno, Lieutenant General David W.

(USA), 140, 143

basic services, 19, 34, 137

Basrah, Iraq, 153, 168, 174

Battle of Sadr City (Iraq), 165, 168

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 41

Bennis, Warren G., 89

197

Index
Berlin Wall, 143

Bonn Agreement (2001), 135, 137–38

Brahimi, Lakhdar, 138

Bremer, L. Paul, III, 10, 107

Brennan, John, 163

British Broadcasting Corporation, 41

Bush, President George W., 24–25, 160,

172, 175

C

Cable News Network, 25, 41

Casey, General George W., Jr. (USA), 10,

12, 92, 97

Cash, Johnny, 104

CENTCOM. See U.S. Central Command

Center of Excellence, 179

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 157

Chile, 134

civil war, 30, 118

Civil War (U.S.), 105

Clausewitz, Carl von, 105

Clinton, William J. “Bill,” 176

CNN (Cable News Network), 25, 41

coalition, 23–24, 99, 116

Coalition, 116–17, 128–30, 142, 167

Provisional Authority, 10

Cohen, Leonard, 103

Colombia, 150

Combat Maneuver Training Center, 39

Combined Action Program, 74

Combined Security Transition Command–

Afghanistan, 74, 169

COMISAF (Commander International

Security Assistance Force), 155, 161

communication, 32, 81, 97, 116–18, 145, 173

Crocker, Ambassador Ryan C., 22–23, 107,

172–74

CSTC-A. See Combined Security

Transition Command–Afghanistan

D

Decker, General George H. (USA), 37

distributed operations, 52

district, 19, 157, 169–70

Afghanistan, 21, 72–73

elections, 141–42

Farah, 161

governance, 116–17

leadership, 137–38

doctor, 19, 99, 173

Dora, Iraq, 158

E

East Germany, 143

Eikenberry, Ambassador Karl W., 159

Egypt, 150, 154

election, 19

Afghanistan, 12, 111, 133–34, 137–43,

146, 159

Iraq, 153–54

Election Complaints Commission, 159

El Salvador, 150

embedded provincial reconstruction team

(EPRT), 43

embedded training team (ETT), 74, 126–

27, 129

engineers, 19, 127

EPRT. See embedded provincial

198
reconstruction team

ETT. See embedded training team

Euphrates River, 51

“Everybody Knows,” 103

F

Failaka Island, Kuwait, 80

Fall, Bernard, 19

Fallujah, Iraq, 51, 60, 64, 153

Camp, 64

Farah district, Afghanistan, 161

Federally Administered Tribal Areas, 152,

154, 156

Field Manual 3-0 (FM 3-0), 163

“5 Ms,” 44–45

Flournoy, Michèle, 159

FM 3-0, 163

forward operating base (FOB), 41, 53, 67,

69, 126, 129

Fort Leavenworth, KS, 48, 174, 176

Fox News, 41

Franks, General Tommy R. (USA), 104–5

fusion cell, 53, 173

G

Galula, David, 30, 107

Galvin, General John “Jack” (USA), 150

Gates, Robert M., 22, 79, 173

governance, 68, 134–36, 151

Afghanistan, 112–13, 117, 138–39, 142

factor in counterinsurgency, 9–11, 34,

115

Iraq, 169

Islamic basis, 140

Graves, General Howard D. (USA), 95

Guadalcanal, 19

Gulf Air Warfare Center, 163

H

Haditha, Iraq, 52, 81

Hamas, 151

Hariri, Saad, 154

Harvey, Derek, 166

Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 158, 161

Herat Province, Afghanistan, 158, 161

Hix, Colonel William C. “Bill” (USA), 106

Holbrooke, Ambassador Richard, 159

Horn of Africa, 150

Hort, Colonel John (USA), 165

Hussein, Saddam, 10

I

IEC (Independent Election Commission),

159

IED. See improvised explosive device

improvised explosive device (IED), 90, 127,

156, 168

Independent Election Commission (IEC),

159

International Security Assistance Force

(ISAF), 115, 155

Iraqi National Police, 11, 46

ISAF. See International Security Assistance

Force

J

Jaish al-Mahdi militia, 44

199

Index
Jeddah, 155

Johnson, President Lyndon B., 25

Johnson, General Stephen T. (USMC), 54

joint security station ( JSS), 45, 158, 168, 173

Joint Special Operations Command ( JSOC),

163

joint tactical area controller ( JTAC), 177

Jones, General James L. (USMC), 46

Jones, Major General T. S. (USMC), 54

JSOC. See Joint Special Operations

Command

JSS. See joint security station

junior officers, 86–92, 97, 99–100

K

Kabul, Afghanistan, 12, 103, 105, 111, 116–

17, 125, 127, 138–39, 141–42, 145

kandak, 127–28

Kapisa Province, Afghanistan, 125

Karzai, Hamid, 11, 138, 140–41, 169

Kennedy, President John F., 37

kinetic events, 19

Kandahar, Afghanistan, 115, 158, 161

Khowst Province, Afghanistan, 115

Komer, Robert W., 25

Krulak, General Charles C. (USMC), 61, 157

Kunduz, Afghanistan, 158

Kurd, 153

Kuwait, 63, 172

L

Lamb, Lieutenant General Graeme (British

Army), 166

Lawrence, T. E., 38, 43, 48

leadership, 9–15, 21, 23–5, 30, 33, 37, 47, 61,

65, 67, 72, 77–78, 86–89, 91, 95, 97, 104–7,

112, 117, 124, 127–28, 134, 136–38, 141,

143, 150, 157, 162, 164, 167, 172, 174

Lebanese Armed Forces, 154

Lebanon, 151, 154, 172

legal authority, 82

Lute, Lieutenant General Douglas E. (USA),

25, 163

Lynes, Jerry, 176

M

Magsaysay, Ramon del Fierro, 14

Mansoor, Colonel Peter R. (USA), 60, 70

March Air Force Base, CA, 54

“March madness,” 168

Marshall, General George C. (USA), 104

Matilda Village, CA, 54

Mattis, General James N. (USMC), 22, 54,

61, 81

McChrystal, General Stanley A. (USA), 10–

11, 22, 59, 70, 111–12, 117, 119, 159–62, 166,

169

McClellan, Major General George B. (USA),

105

McKiernan, General David D. (USA), 22,

69, 159

McMaster, Brigadier General H. R. (USA),

58–59, 62–63, 65, 104, 155, 159, 166, 173

Mehsud, Baitullah, 152

mentors, 72, 97, 125–27, 129–30

Mesopotamian stampede, 156

military education, 46–47

MNF-I. See Multi National Force–Iraq

200
Mosul, Iraq, 168

Multi National Division–Baghdad, 168

Multi National Force–Iraq (MNF-I), 10, 12,

46, 166

Mojave Viper, 54

N

Naif, Mohammed bin, 155

Najaf, Iraq, 163

Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, 127

narcotics trafficking, 152

nation building, 111

NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty

Organization

Neller, Major General Robert B. (USMC), 59

network, 32, 156

Neumann, Ambassador Ronald, 175

Nicholson, Brigadier General Lawrence D.

(USMC), 51

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

(NATO), 11, 13, 21, 24, 69, 111, 113, 118–

20, 143, 162

Nuristan Province, Afghanistan, 127

O

Obama, President Barack H., 25, 112, 157, 160

Odierno, General Raymond T. (USA), 106

officer retention, 47–48, 92, 93, 95–97

operations

Bright Star, 154

Iron Saber, 45

Longstreet, 45

P

Pakistan, 77, 105, 113, 118–20, 150, 152, 155,

157, 159, 166–67, 169, 172, 177

Pashtun, 11, 72

Pashtunwali, 72

Patriot missile, 154

Patton, General George S., Jr. (USA), 21

“Peaches,” 104

Persian Gulf, 154–55

Peru, 150

Peshawar, 138

Petraeus, General David H. (USA), 11, 21–

23, 44, 46, 60, 81, 85, 104, 106–7

Phase Line Gold, 165

Philippines, 14

pillar, 91, 136–37

PME. See professional military education

political leadership, 24, 33, 143

professional military education (PME), 46–48

provincial reconstruction team (PRT), 22, 43,

73, 130

PRT. See provincial reconstruction team

Q

al-Qa’im, Iraq, 52, 69

R

radio, 41, 126, 142

Radio Azadi, 145

Radio Free Europe, 144

Radio Liberty, 144–45

Ramadi, Iraq, 52, 57, 66,

Ramadi Awakening, 67, 166

201

Index
Rebellion, Huk, 14

reconcilables, 166, 171

regional command, 123, 158, 161

report

Jones, 46

Lute, 159

McChrystal, 10–11

Riedel, 157–58

Government Accountability Office

Retention, 93, 96, 99

Sepp-Hix, 106

Strategic Studies Institute, 98

Rice, Condoleezza, 17

Riedel, Bruce, 157–58

Rodriguez, Lieutenant General David

(USA), 162

ROE. See rules of engagement

Roosevelt, Brigadier General ceodore, Jr.

(USA), 106

rules of engagement, 64, 88–89

Rusafa, Iraq, 41

S

Sadr City, Iraq, 44, 165, 168

Saint Augustine, 83

Sarobi, Afghanistan, 125

Saudi Arabia, 52, 154–55

security, 144

in Islam, 140–41

regional, 163

Sepp, Kalev “Gunner,” 106

Sheridan, General Philip H. (USA), 14

Shia, 151, 153, 168

Shiite, 40

shura, 127, 135

SOCCENT. See Special Operations

Command Central

social engineering, 144

SOCOM. See U.S. Special Operations

Command

SOF. See special operations forces

Somalia, 150–51, 156

Sons of Iraq, 74, 168

South Asia, 119

South Korea, 134

Southern Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, 140

Special Operations Command Central

(SOCCENT), 155

special operations forces (SOF), 43, 52–53,

81, 168

special weapons and tactics (SWAT), 170

strategic bombing theory, 30

strategic corporal, 80–81, 83

strategic patience, 23

Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), 89

strategies

exit, 114, 118–19, 136, 144

Sunni, 11, 40, 153, 157, 168

Sunni Awakening, 11

T

Tagab Valley, Afghanistan, 125, 127, 129–

30, 141

Taiwan, 134

Tal Afar, Iraq, 30

Taliban, 21, 58, 59, 70, 112–16, 118–20,

134, 139–40, 145, 158, 160

202
task force

Bayonet, 129

Cyclone, 129

Duke Warrior, 129

Gladiator, 129

Gladius, 129

Kandahar, 161

Terlizzi, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony

(USMC), 127

Tet Offensive (Vietnam), 40

three-block war, 80, 83

Trainor, Lieutenant General Bernard

(USMC), 149, 156

tribe, 11, 39–40, 57, 142, 169–70

Twain, Mark, 91

Twentynine Palms, CA, 54

Tzu, Sun, 32

U

United Arab Emirates, 163

United Kingdom

22 Special Air Service Regiment, 166

Special Forces, 166

Task Force–Helmand, 161

United Nations Assistance Mission

Afghanistan (UNAMA), 115

U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), 151

U.S. Agency for International Development

(USAID), 176

U.S. Army

Combined Arms Center, 174, 176

National Guard, 13

National Training Center, 105, 165

Officer Candidate School (OCS), 94

Reserve Officer Training Corps

(ROTC), 94–95

Reserves, 13

Units

1st Armored Division

1st Brigade, 39, 45

10th Mountain Division, 160

82nd Airborne Division, 161

101st Airborne Division, 126, 178

173rd Airborne Brigade, 179

Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 161

War College, 48, 89

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM),

149–52, 154, 159, 161, 166–67, 179

U.S. Commander Emergency Response

Program, 44, 90

U.S. Marine Corps

Marine Expeditionary Force, 52

II Marine Expeditionary Force

(II MEF), 54

Marine Expeditionary Brigade, 160–61

2d Marine Expeditionary

Brigade, 51

Marine Expeditionary Unit, 178

15th Marine Expeditionary Unit,

60

1st Battalion, 1st Marines (1/1), 60

Battalion Landing Team, 77

3d Battalion, 6th Marines, 52, 69

Regimental Combat Team, 51, 53

Regimental Combat Team 2, 51

Regimental Combat Team 5, 60

Regimental Combat Team 7, 51

203

Index
U.S. Military Academy (USMA), 94–95

U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Team, 22,

43, 73, 130

U.S. Special Operations Command

(SOCOM), 151, 163

U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM),

150

U.S. State Department

Training Center, 176

V

Viet Cong, 40

Vietminh, 19

Vietnam, 19, 22, 40, 74, 170–71

W

warlord, 11–12, 135

Wardak, Abdul Rahim, 12

Wardak Logar, Afghanistan, 160, 170

West, Francis J. “Bing,” 46

Williams, Brigadier General Samuel T.

(USA), 106

women, 112, 118, 144–45

Wong, Lieutenant Colonel Leonard (USA),

89

Y

Yemen, 150, 154, 156

Yingling, Paul, 104

Z

Zameri, Brigadier General, 125–27

204



Since the surge in Iraq in 2007, counterinsurgency (COIN) has been at the

forefront of military and foreign affairs debates. Although COIN is not a new idea,

the ongoing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought renewed attention to its

theory and practice as top leaders in both the government and the military have

considered the most effective strategy for these conflicts.

A symposium cosponsored by Marine Corps University and the Marine Corps

University Foundation explored the complexities of COIN leadership in Afghanistan,

Iraq, and beyond. From that symposium came these papers, which discuss topics such

as brigade and regimental command, officer development in the military, and general

officer leadership. Featuring leading COIN theorists and practitioners from the military,

academic, and private sectors, this volume sheds new light on past and present COIN

operations and points the way toward those in the future.

Counterinsurgency Leadership: ?e Key to

Afghanistan and Iraq

Mark Moyar

Supreme Command in Irregular Warfare

Eliot A. Cohen

?e Art of Brigade Command in

Counterinsurgency

H. R. McMaster

Brigade Command in Counterinsurgency

Operations: Lessons from the Iraq War

Peter R. Mansoor

Regimental Command in

Counterinsurgency

W. Blake Crowe

?e Art of Battalion Command in

Counterinsurgency: A Discussion

Francis J. “Bing” West

David J. Furness

William M. Jurney

Julian Dale Alford

Officer Development for Counterinsurgency

Nathaniel C. Fick

?e “Major” Challenge of Junior Officer

Leadership Development and Talent

Management

Paula D. Broadwell

Generalship and Counterinsurgency

comas E. Ricks

Winning in Afghanistan

David W. Barno and John K. Wood

Advising Afghan Military Forces

Jeffery M. Haynes

?e Afghan Election and the Future of

Afghanistan’s Leadership: A Discussion

Robert D. Kaplan

Clare Lockhart

Amin Tarzi

Jeffrey Gedmin

A Conversation with

General David H. Petraeus