The Army You Have - Dexter Filkens, New York Times book review.
... It took a long time - Iraq imploded, and 32,000 Americans were killed or wounded - but the Army finally righted itself. The temporary buildup known as the surge may have helped stabilize the country, but what really pulled Iraq back from the abyss was that the Army fighting in the later years was vastly different from the one that went in at the start. The Army transformed itself in Iraq, and not a moment too soon.
The story of that transformation, and of the generals at the heart of it, is the subject of "The Fourth Star" by David Cloud, a correspondent at The New York Times from 2005 to 2007, and Greg Jaffe, the Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post. (Cloud and I met once while he worked at The Times, and we contributed to two articles together and shared a byline on a third.) This book is about four generals - David Petraeus and Peter Chiarelli, who led the transformation, and George W. Casey Jr. and John Abizaid, who were ultimately left behind by it. As "The Fourth Star" makes clear, it was only the efforts of Generals Petraeus and Chiarelli, and other like-minded officers, that saved America from a cataclysm in the Middle East.
"The Fourth Star" paints wonderfully dramatic portraits of the four senior officers highlighted here, but at its heart it's a story about bureaucracy. As an institution, the United States Army has much more in common with, say, a giant corporation like General Motors than with a professional sports team like the New York Giants. You can't cut players who don't perform, and it's hard to fire your head coach. Like General Motors, the Army changes very slowly, and once it does, it's hard to turn it around again...
More at The New York Times.
The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army - Greg Jaffe and David Cloud (Amazon.com)
Comments
Schmedlap:
Fair points. To be sure give credit where credit is due, but in these recent bevy of books credit has turned into hagiography. I dont know how to read these works in any other way.
I agree somewhat with your point about continuity and the notion of a strategic approach of exhaustion on our part in wearing down the certain warring factions in Iraq. Yet as I have argued before in many places, the idea that the Surge starts and general Petraeus kicked everybody off of their fobs and into the neighborhoods in a systematic and all-inclusive way is not supported by the operational record as we know it now. To be sure the moving off of fobs and into cops and JSSs did happen but it did so sporadically and was dependent on conditions in different areas. Also, the notion as the Surge narrative portrays it (just like Jaffe and Cloud) that once we were kicked off of our Fobs and into the neighborhoods American combat units started to do Galula and win hearts and minds is also highly problematic. In fact if one talks to folks who were on the ground during the first 5 months of the Surge the American Army was actually doing smash-mouth kinetic action fueled by valuable human intelligence provided by former sunni insurgent enemies. In this sense there is much to admire and lay credit to the combat outfits led by General Odierno who carried these kinetic actions out.
gian
I actually do think Petraeus is due a ton of credit, but not for transforming the Army or doing anything particularly revolutionary in Iraq. Where I think he is owed a lot of credit is in being the public face of the war. The President, rightly or wrongly, shifted all expectations onto his shoulders. It's probably not the ideal role, but he played it well. I suspect that political support would have collapsed before the situation improved were it not for his stage performance.
As for success in Iraq, I think the real key was simply that we had been operating there for years and had finally wore down adversaries, developed sufficient intelligence, amassed enough theater specific experience, gave enough small unit leaders access to funds, and small units had finally figured things out. Once that was achieved, 90% of the turn-around was to simply give the order to stop FOB consolidation and push back out into the cities.
Schmedlap:
I read it carefully a few weeks ago as I advance ordered a copy.
To be blunt, there is nothing really new in this book. It falls perfectly in line with the Iraq War/Surge triumph narrative as put forward in other hagiographies like Ricks and Robinson and Kagan. Oh of course one could point to some differences in them in focus and assessments of certain generals (e.g., Ricks is critical of Chiarelli and Jaffe/Cloud are not, etc) but the overall narrative arc and thrust are exactly the same.
This book is a catechism for America's new way of war of population centric coin and nation building. It intentionally paints Casey (unfairly I might add and without any real evidence beyond a few interviews and the authors desire to conform with the triumph narrative) as the one general who still clings to the old and outdated Powell-doctrine way of doing things while portraying the other three ultimately as generals who get the new way of war of intervention into the worlds troubled spots. Tellingly in this regard the parts of the book that discusses Abizaids earlier career it spent about three sentences describing his actions as a ranger company commander in Grenada where Abizaid saw actual combat but then multiple pages later on for Abizaid when he was a battalion commander and tasked to protect the Kurds after the first Gulf War in a stability operations. See what I mean, why such the minor focus on the fact that Abizaid, as a company grade officer, was the only one of the four who ever saw actual combat and fought but instead they chose to focus on him and the doing of stability operation. This gives you a sense of the direction of the book.
The three (Paetraeus, Chiarelli, and Abizaid) to be sure are assessed more favorably in degree starting with Abizaid in the least favorable light, then progressing to Chiarelli, then finally to Petraeus as the savior. In fact the book really is another hagiographic portrait of General Petraeus.
There are basic factual problems with the book too. It completely misunderstands the issue and arguments of Krepinevichs work on Vietnam and portrays him as one of the lone army officers who gets it in the 80s, has divined the Armys true lessons from Vietnam, and because of that he is attacked by the big bad fulda gap army and was banished off to the Pentagon and refused later advancements. See where this is going? Of course in the book other younger officers in the Sosh Department at West Point at the time see the maverick like nature of Krepinevich, appreciate it, and then deploy their own style of it in later years.
This book is the Coin Matrix, it conforms perfectly to it. If you have already read any of the other books (Robinson, Ricks, Kagan, et al) then dont waste your time reading this one: Nothing really new or interesting in it at all.
<em>"... what really pulled Iraq back from the abyss was that the Army fighting in the later years was vastly different from the one that went in at the start. The Army transformed itself in Iraq..."</em>
Exactly. Somebody in the media gets it.
I realize that there was probably no other way to put this into book form without casting some well known individuals in superlative roles, but I am curious about the statement that, "... David Petraeus and Peter Chiarelli, who led the transformation, and George W. Casey Jr. and John Abizaid, who were ultimately left behind by it."
I guess I'll have to read the book to fully understand this. I think the drive for change came from within. The guys at the top merely got credit for what did or did not happen. I really wonder if Abizaid and Casey were left behind by transformation or if they were simply commanding a force that was still learning. We were really starting to get it in 2006 and by that time had resources (UAVs, HUMINT sources, etc) and procedures in place to allow small unit leaders to figure things out and solve them (example: CERP). In 2007, all Petraeus had to do was reverse the FOB consolidation trend, push us back to our PBs/COPs, and let us do our thing. That was 90% of the battle.