The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror
by Dexter Filkins
Knopf, 2008, 368 pages
Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq
by Linda Robinson
Public Affairs, 2008, 416 pages
The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008
by Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster, 2008, 512 pages
When the insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the United States Army was caught unprepared. Until then, it had been designed, trained, and equipped to win conventional wars, and was without doubt peerless in that arena. But it was not ready for an enemy who understood that it had no hope of defeating the United States on a conventional battlefield, and therefore chose to wage war against it from the shadows.
Yet over the five years that followed, in one of history's most remarkable examples of adaptation under fire, the United States Army learned to conduct a surprisingly successful counterinsurgency campaign. Three new books, each by a prominent journalist, tell the story of that dramatic change, two from on the ground in Iraq and one from the corridors of Washington. Viewing the conflict from their different perspectives provides important insights into a war that America was losing badly only two years ago, and now looks to have turned around. It also suggests something about how America is likely to fight the war in Afghanistan under President Obama, and offers broader lessons about the nature of warfare in the twenty-first century...
Read more of the reviews at Azure.
The War in Iraq - Peter Mansoor, Azure
I enjoyed reading John Nagl's excellent review (Ending the Neverending War," AZURE 35, Winter 2009) of three books that tell the story of the debacle and re-birth of American strategy in the Iraq war. It is a cautionary tale for any number of nations in the twenty-first century, Israel included. Nagl mentions that the U.S. Army was thoroughly unprepared for counterinsurgency warfare in 2003, but since the reasons for that lapse fell outside the purview of the books he was reviewing, he doesn't state why. Simply put, the United States military has a love affair with technology and, during the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, developed concepts that substituted technological prowess for strategic relevance. The future American way of war, according to certain defense intellectuals, was summed up in the phrase Rapid Decisive Operations," otherwise known as shock and awe." Using sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms, American forces would be able to find and distinguish all relevant targets on the battlefield and then, using precision-guided munitions, destroy them. Wars would be quick and relatively bloodless.
What the proponents of this approach failed to realize is that military operations are neither rapid nor decisive unless they lead to a more enduring peace. In this regard, the United States was guilty of trying to replace strategy with tactical and operational concepts that had marginal relevance to the kinds of wars that the nation would face after 9/11. We were guilty of becoming the Germans of the twenty-first century—a nation that used brilliant tactical and operational concepts but lost two world wars on account of strategic incompetence...
More at Azure.
Comments
Agree with most of Mark's points above.
Nagl's and Mansoor's pieces are superbly written; Nagl especially as his review essay makes clear has the gift of the pen. He masterfully weaves story-telling of the war in Iraq with a compelling drama of ignorance, failure, redemption through change, then success, with injections of individual players like himself, Generals Keane and Petraeus, Colonel Dale Kuehl who made decisive differences. Mansoor's supporting letter confirms Nagl's persuasive story and uses it as a launch-pad to suggest the direction of the American military toward a future as defined by recent involvement in Iraq. Mansoor even goes so far as to suggest implicitly to the Israelis that to win their war they should adopt the American model of population centric counterinsurgency that focuses on placing the people of a country as the "prize." Whether or not this actually makes political and strategic sense for Israel is another story.
Nagl and Mansoor, for all of their literary excellence, write the matrix--or to use the term of derision often applied by Counterinsurgency expert and advocate Tom Ricks, the "evil" Iraq War narrative. Yet there is a narrative that dominates current thinking about the Iraq War and Nagls review essay and Mansoors short supporting missive reflect it perfectly. It is partially correct, but there are serious holes in both in terms of manipulation of evidence and in interpretation and of projections into the future. My friend, SWJ Editor Dave Dilegge, used to use a funny pictorial quip of the Energizer Rabbit beating a drum to poke fun at me in what Dave characterized through the quip as my constant beating of the "anti-Coin" drum. Perhaps Dave should consider poking fun at Nagl and Mansoor for their beating of the Iraq War triumph narrative drum.
The issue that I have here is the characterisation of the war in Iraq as a 'successful' counterinsurgency. The problem with such a characterisation is that it ignores one simple but telling fact - several insurgencies still exist within Iraq. If anyone doubts that I challenge them to walk unarmed in US or IA uniform through most of Mosul, the DRV or the flats in Basra...
We need to be very careful not to confuse 'progress' with 'victory'. The 'change' attributed to the Obama Administration in John Nagl's article has far more to do with domestic poltical beliefs than any change in the situtaion on the ground in Iraq.
Let us not confuse western desire for 'success' and withdrawal with the reality on the ground. The Iraqi domestic political situation did not fundamentally change one iota with the election of Obama - people need to not project their hope, views and ambitions onto an Iraqi political situation that is fundamentally divorced from US domestic politcal opinion,
regards
Mark