Guy Posts

I picked up The Gamble because of its subtitle: “General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008″. Petraeus seems to have succeeded in Iraq and I wanted to understand why.

If you’re not too familiar with the literature on contemporary warfare or well versed in counter-insurgency (COIN) tactics, the book succeeds in providing a clear explanation of the basics. Furthermore, the book serves as a remarkable case study for how to formulate, convey, adopt, and execute a dramatic shift in strategy.

The problem: Iraq was spiraling into chaos. American patrols were ineffective at diminishing Al Qaeda’s influence. The strategy of shoot first, ask questions later was doing little to win the trust of the Iraqi people. Furthermore, America’s transient troop presence in Iraqi communities created deadly consequences for those who aided American troops. Taken together, the result was greater civilian and military casualties and a growing sense that the country was sliding into— if not already in— a civil war.

General David Petraeus had a plan to change this. The plan required a re-definition of the mission whereby success hinged on securing and winning the trust of the Iraqi people. To do this, many things had to change. First, the strategy of running daily patrols from large forward operating bases was abandoned in favor of smaller outposts spread out around cities and communities with an aim towards placing a soldier on every street corner.

Ricks details a shift in deployment tactics in the book that embodies Petraeus’s emphasis on pragmatic, action-oriented solutions to counterinsurgency:

“The first step under the new approach was to send Special Operations sniper teams to sneak into the building he wanted to occupy. Then he would have a “route clearance” team work its way through the roadside bombs to the building, followed immediately by a company of Army troops or Marines to occupy the building. Upon arrival they would begin building a new combat outpost… They even figured out how to use a crane to immediately deposit a steel ‘crow’s nest’ on top of a building, so they could begin with a well-protected observation post without having to divert troops to filling and carrying sandbags to the roof.”

Additionally, respecting local customs and traditions became standard operating procedure. As Ricks points out, “the entire approach was distinctly alien to the rapid, decisive, mechanistic, and sometimes Manichean mind-set that had been taught to a generation or two of American commanders. It had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with dealing with some of the oldest of human traits— eye-to-eye contact and heeding the values and ways of tribes and their leaders.”

From the war’s onset, lofty expectations of a democratic Iraqi ally working alongside the United States drove strategic discussions away from establishing stability and towards finding a way to hand control of the country back to the Iraqi government— any Iraqi government so long as it was voted on. As part of the surge, “Petraeus adopted a posture of much lowered expectations.” He chose Frederic Remington’s The Stampede as a symbolic image of his mission in Iraq. “Everything about the painting conveys the threat of chaotic danger… If the cowboy’s pony trips, or throws him to the stony ground, the unfortunate man will be ripped by the horns of the charging cows or pulped by their heavy hooves.” Petraeus explains, “it is a metaphor really of the need to be comfortable with slightly chaotic circumstances… A stampede is not always orderly.”

Petraeus (himself holding a Ph.D from Princeton) had assembled a team of intellectual heavyweights:

“Col. Michael Meese, son of the former attorney general, and himself a Princeton Ph.D. in economics; Lt. Col. Douglas Ollivant, a veteran of battles in Najaf and Fallujah, who did a Ph.D. dissertation on Thomas Jefferson’s political theories; Lt. Col Miller, a Columbia University Ph.D. in political science… Even the junior officers around Petraeus seemed to have a maverick streak to them. One of his aides, Capt. Elizabeth McNally, looked like a future general, having been first in her class at West Point and then a Rhodes Scholar.”

They were outsiders in the sense that their academic qualifications went against the typical military pedigree. Ricks gives former President Bush partial credit for cleaning house and turning the mission in Iraq over to the “pragmatists and skeptics, especially the experts whose advice had been disregarded and even denounced during the run-up to the war.”

Results: After an uptick in initial violence, things appear to have stabilized. The constant, persistent troop presence in cities has made it more difficult for insurgents to move and coordinate.  As a result, they’ve begun “to communicate more electronically,” which makes them more vulnerable to “signals interception operation(s).” Here, the surprising lesson was that a conventional troop presence in the form of boots on the ground indirectly leveraged the American’s technological advantage. Furthermore, by building the trust of the local people, the Iraqi citizens have become more willing to take the initiative against Al Qaeda. In one episode, a commander of an American batallion recalls that he “got a call from a local religious leader. ‘We’re going after al Qaeda,’ he said. ‘What we want you to do is stay out of the way.’”

Petraeus remains cautious, as Ricks suggests he must. “The first and foremost task of a commander is to understand, with a steady head, the nature of the conflict in which he is engaged… In order to achieve that understanding a commander can be neither overly optimistic nor pessimistic.” It’s a view that Ricks has taken as well. The verdict on the surge still hangs in the balance. The larger purpose of it, Ricks reminds us, “had been to create a breathing space that would then enable Iraqi politicians to find a way forward and that hadn’t happened.”