The Fourth Star
The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army by Washington Post Pentagon reporter Greg Jaffe. Judging by an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air today, it sounds interesting. The focus is on four generals, their backgrounds, how they were influenced by the military’s Vietnam and Gulf War experiences as they went into Iraq, and how Petraeus, though looked down on in some quarters as a political general with too much time in DC, had the political skills combined with the philosophical background to advance what has turned out to be the right battlefield answer, counterinsurgency. It’s the personal politics of warfighting. Now reshaping an Army near you.
Fresh Air excerpts make a fascinating read. After the dustjacket copy, via Amazon:
They were four exceptional soldiers, a new generation … They survived the military’s brutal winnowing to reach its top echelon. They became the Army’s most influential generals in the crucible of Iraq.
Collectively, their lives tell the story of the Army over the last four decades and illuminate the path it must travel to protect the nation over the next century …
•Gen. John Abizaid, one of the Army’s most brilliant minds. Fluent in Arabic, he forged an unconventional path in the military to make himself an expert on the Middle East, but this unique background made him skeptical of the war he found himself leading.
•Gen. George Casey Jr., the son of the highest-ranking general to be killed in the Vietnam War. Casey had grown up in the Army and won praise for his common touch and skill as a soldier. He was determined not to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam but would take much of the blame as Iraq collapsed around him.
•Gen. Peter Chiarelli, an emotional, take-charge leader who, more than any other senior officer, felt the sting of the Army’s failures in Iraq. He drove his soldiers, the chain of command, and the U.S. government to rethink the occupation plans–yet rarely achieved the results he sought.
•Gen. David Petraeus, a driven soldier-scholar. Determined to reach the Army’s summit almost since the day he entered West Point, he sometimes alienated peers with his ambition and competitiveness. When he finally got his chance in Iraq, he–more than anyone–changed the Army’s conception of what was possible.
Masterfully written and richly reported, The Fourth Star ranges far beyond today’s battlefields, evoking the Army’s tumultuous history since Vietnam through these four captivating lives and ultimately revealing a fascinating irony: In an institution that prizes obedience, the most effective warriors are often those who dare to question the prevailing orthodoxy and in doing so redefine the American way of war.
Some excerpts from Fresh Air Jaffe interview transcript:
JAFFE : Yeah. Vietnam is a powerful thing kind of lurking in the background of the book and lurking in almost every officer’s life from that era. I mean, all these guys missed Vietnam, but they all joined an Army in the early ’70s that’s badly broken by it, really at its nadir. But the big Army, I think, learns a lesson with regard to Vietnam that oh, my gosh, we’re never going to do that again. We’re not going to fight another guerrilla war. Wars need to be fast and quick, and we need to use overwhelming firepower to destroy the enemy, and we can vote not to fight an insurgency like they had in Vietnam.
I think Abizaid and Petraeus in particular both realized that armies don’t always get to choose the wars they’re in and that they needed to be ready at some level to fight this kind of war. But both Abizaid and Petraeus, for most of their careers, within that context, are dissidents within the larger Army.
…
GROSS: So how did Abizaid’s Gulf War experience shape his thinking on Iraq?
Mr. JAFFE: Well, you know, most of the Army’s – for the Gulf War is the 100-hour tank battle, you know, which is this tank-on-tank fight in which the U.S. Army, you know, obliterates the Iraqi army. Abizaid has a different experience. He misses the tank battle. He’s stuck in Italy, much to his chagrin and disappointment for that, but is sent in in the latter days of the war -essentially after the war – to northern Iraq on a mission to protect the Kurds.
It quickly turns to he’s also protecting the Iraqi army and the Iraqi army soldiers from the Kurds, and Iraqi soldiers are running to his checkpoint. And he has this – tells this very interesting story. In the latter days of his mission there, he’s walking with a Kurdish Peshmerga, a Kurdish militia fighter, and they – the Kurds have caught a couple of Iraqi soldiers who were stragglers, and they grabbed these Iraqis and they torture them and then kill them. And Abizaid, in his very typical, John Abizaid way, says hey, if you’re going to kill them, anyway, why do you bother to torture them? And the Peshmerga, the militia, Kurdish militia fighter, says well, nobody fears death. People fear torture. And we have to kill them and torture them and leave them in the middle of the road as an example to the other Iraqi soldiers not to mess with us anymore.
And at that point, I think Abizaid, who already sensed this, realizes that the Iraq War might be over for the U.S. Army. It might be over for the United States of America, but it’s still continuing for the Iraqi people and continues throughout the ’90s, until we invade the country again in 2003.
GROSS: … Let’s jump ahead and look at General Petraeus, who becomes the leader of the forces in Iraq, and he believes that counterinsurgency can work.
Again, he becomes a career Army person in the ’70s, after Vietnam. What did he take away from Vietnam that made him think counterinsurgency’s going to work in Iraq?
Mr. JAFFE: You know, it’s interesting. It’s less what he took away and where he came from. I mean, the Army, we think of it as this sort of big, green monolith, but it’s actually a collection of sort of tribes and sub-tribes, and Petraeus is from this really interesting sub-tribe called the SOSH Department. It’s essentially professors, officers who are chosen as professors, sent to the best graduate schools and then teach for a couple years at West Point before they go back out into the service. They teach cadets economics, political science, international relations.
And Petraeus grows up in the SOSH Department, and when he’s there, it’s an interesting time in the mid-’80s. The SOSH Department is taking very different lessons about the Vietnam War than the rest of the Army. The rest of the Army kind of looks at Vietnam, as I said, and says oh, gosh, we never want to do that again, and we can vote not to do it.
The SOSH Department argues that the mistake the Army made was not fighting a guerrilla war, but fighting a guerrilla war badly, and that wars were more than just about destroying the enemy and firepower and that if you really wanted to fight a counterinsurgency, you had to focus on protecting the population on economics, on politics.
Military officers had to be masters of sort of all of these domains, and this is the environment in which Petraeus sort of spends a lot of his time as an impressionable major, and I think that’s where he kind of thinks to himself hey, we can do this. Counterinsurgency is something we can sort of master.
… I think he’s had a huge impact just in terms of what officers do and how they approach war. I mean, Petraeus is an incredibly adaptable kind of guy. I mean, on the one hand, he looks kind of rigid. He’s very sort of detail-focused, you know, as an officer, as a kind of battalion and brigade commander, a lieutenant colonel and colonel.
I mean, he was a notorious kind of micromanager with regard to having bazillions of rules, rules upon rules upon rules. But as a general, he’s surprisingly adaptable and redefined sort of what it means to be an officer.
There’s one example that I think sort of shows it, when – this is in Mosul, when he’s there in 2003. Mosul’s ultimately a failure for a lot of reasons, but it’s an illuminating failure. I mean, Petraeus is there, and he’s in – and one of the big problems is the locals badly want electricity.
So he cuts a deal with the Syrians in which he sells them Iraqi oil for electricity without cluing in the State Department. I think he realizes that if he asks the State Department, they might tell him no. So it was better just to do it and then have them undo it.
But it’s interesting. He has these week-long negotiations with the Syrians. They finally agree, fly out to the border to open the valve to send oil, Iraqi oil, into Syria in exchange for electricity. They slaughter a lamb and dip their hands in the blood and then touch their hands on the pipeline, and Petraeus does this, as well. And I asked him, you know, how did it feel? He said warm.
… How do you interact, or how do you respond when the politicians ask you to do something you don’t want to do or you think is a bad idea?
Abizaid and Petraeus have, I think, substantially different interpretations of it. I mean, both of them understand that the military works for their political masters, but they interpret that relationship differently, and I’ll give you an example. On de-Baathification, Abizaid – which is getting rid of the former – Saddam’s former Baath Party people.
Abizaid argues fiercely against it. I mean, he bangs the table and screams that this is a stupid idea. Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, two senior Bush administration officials in the Pentagon, compare de-Baathification to de-Nazification following World War II, and Abizaid screams this isn’t World War II. This isn’t the liberation of France. But when he’s told that that’s the policy, he shuts up and he executes it.
Petraeus, on the other hand, I think is more willing to push the limits and force people to tell him no or stop it. The example – a good example is in Mosul in 2003. You know, he holds elections there in which a Baathist is named governor. And he supports that Baathist, and that guy, Ghanim al-Basso, remains governor as long as he’s there, as Petraeus is there, and sort of waits for someone to tell him no, don’t do that.
Another example is the awakening, where the Sunni tribes stand up against al-Qaida and the U.S. pays, essentially, Sunni tribesmen in 2007 and 2008 to sort of come to the U.S. side. Petraeus doesn’t ask permission back home to do that. He just does it and waits for someone to tell him hey, you shouldn’t have done that.
…
Well, here’s what I find fascinating about this moment. It’s a little bit like we’ve fallen down one of these “Alice in Wonderland” rabbit holes. I mean, from Vietnam almost to 2007, it was the military who was saying to the civilians, hey, don’t make us fix these broken societies. We can’t do it. We can’t make these people like each other, and this is the wrong way to use military power.
You know, the military comes out of Vietnam believing that to its core. And it’s the civilians – whether it’s the Clinton administration, which is pushing the military into places like Haiti or the Balkans or the Bush administration, which is pushing the military into Iraq. It’s the civilians who are saying no, you guys can do it. Let’s get in there and we’ll figure it out.
And now we’re at this moment where the military’s saying with regard to Afghanistan, hey, give us 44,000 troops, more troops, in addition to the 68 we’ve got now. We can fix this place based on what we did in Iraq, you know, and what I think the military sees as Petraeus’ Army’s achievements in Iraq. We can do this.
And it’s civilians now who are saying hey, wait a minute, whoa. This is a broken, messed-up place, and we need to be more modest in our ambitions. So it’s a really odd moment.
…
GROSS: Petraeus was so high profile when he was commanding the troops in Iraq, and now that he’s the head of CENTCOM, you hear very little from Petraeus directly. You don’t even hear that much about him. Why is that?
Mr. JAFFE: I think, yeah, I think Petraeus is aware of that, too.
GROSS: And also, I should add, you know, he has a reputation for being really ambitious and for actually, you know, really liking the attention.
Mr. JAFFE: He loves the press. Well, I don’t know if he loves the press. He loves being loved by the press.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. JAFFE: Yeah, I mean, it goes to – I mean, the Petraeus-Bush relationship was a really unusual one, and it was a troubling one to many in the Army, and I think it was a troubling one even to General Petraeus.
I mean, President Bush, at the end of his tenure, was a wounded president. He could not speak credibly to the American people about the war, and he needed somebody who could, and Petraeus was that guy. And Petraeus was sort of the perfect person to fill that void.
I mean, he’s a political general, and in the Army, that’s a really derogatory term. It means that you spent kind of too much time in Washington, too much time in the Pentagon at the elbow of four-star generals and not enough time getting your boots muddy with soldiers. But I think Petraeus’ career, which is a very nontraditional one, really helped him.
I mean, he – I think he does four tours as a general’s aide. Most officers do one, and if you do two, you’re looked at as a little bit of – a little bit suspect, a little bit of a sycophant. But this time he spends at sort of the elbow of four-star generals gives him a really terrific sense of how politics work in Washington. And so he’s able to fill that void for President Bush to become the public face of the war, to deal with congressional delegations when they come, to sort of sell the war to the American people and to Congress, which is something that Casey and Abizaid determinedly did not want to do.
They didn’t think it was proper for a military officer to do that, but Petraeus does it. Petraeus admits that he’s a little uncomfortable doing it, but he does it, anyway. And I think Obama wants a very different relationship with his generals. He doesn’t want one general to be the public face of the war.
You know, Bush would always say, well, I’m going to do what Petraeus says. And Obama is definitely not in the I’m-going-to-do-what-Petraeus-says or I’m-going-to-do-what-General-McChrystal-says camp. He’s going to listen to a lot of voices and make a decision.
Discussion on the messiness of Afghanistan follows. Whole thing here.
Your purchases of The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army help support the site.
Meanwhile, it’s a heady world, up there with the four stars, but don’t forget the grunts on the ground. The Valour IT push is on, to give laptops to wounded servicemen. At the invitation of Cassandra at Villainous Company, whose Marine husband is forward deployed in Afghanistan, we’re with Team Marines this year. Pushing the Marines ahead is just the fun part of the drive. It all goes to everyone in all branches. Give as you can.
Topics: Afghanistan, Iraq, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:34 pm Comments (0) on Wednesday, October 28, 2009
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