The Washington Post: The Generals' Insurgency
Author(s): Tom Ricks
Original Post: The Generals' Insurgency
Type: Feature
Date: 02/08/2009
Part One, “Odierno’s Surge: The Dissenter Who Changed the War”
February 8, 2009 - Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno was an unlikely dissident, with little in his past to suggest that he would buck his superiors and push the U.S. military in radically new directions.
A 1976 West Point graduate and veteran of the Persian Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign, Odierno had earned a reputation as the best of the Army's conventional thinkers -- intelligent and ambitious, but focused on using the tools in front of him rather than discovering new and unexpected ones. That image was only reinforced during his first tour in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003.
As commander of the 4th Infantry Division in the Sunni Triangle, Odierno led troops known for their sometimes heavy-handed tactics, kicking in doors and rounding up thousands of Iraqi "MAMs" (military-age males). He finished his tour believing the fight was going well. "I thought we had beaten this thing," he would later recall.
Sent back to Iraq in 2006 as second in command of U.S. forces, under orders to begin the withdrawal of American troops and shift fighting responsibilities to the Iraqis, Odierno found a situation that he recalled as "fairly desperate, frankly."
So that fall, he became the lone senior officer in the active-duty military to advocate a buildup of American troops in Iraq, a strategy rejected by the full chain of command above him, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top commander in Iraq and Odierno's immediate superior.
Communicating almost daily by phone with retired Gen. Jack Keane, an influential former Army vice chief of staff and his most important ally in Washington, Odierno launched a guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq, conducting his own strategic review and bypassing his superiors to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military. It would prove one of the most audacious moves of the Iraq war, and one that eventually reversed almost every tenet of U.S. strategy.
Just over two years ago, President George W. Bush announced that he was ordering a "surge" of U.S. forces. But that was only part of what amounted to a major change in the mission of American troops, in which many of the traditional methods employed by Odierno and other U.S. commanders in the early years of the war were discarded in favor of tactics based on the very different doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare.
Now, President Obama, an opponent of the war and later the surge, must deal with the consequences of the surge's success -- an Iraq that looks to be on the mend, with U.S. casualties so reduced that commanders talk about keeping tens of thousands of soldiers there for many years to come.
The most prominent advocates of maintaining that commitment are the two generals who implemented the surge and changed the direction of the war: Odierno and David H. Petraeus, who replaced Casey in 2007 as the top U.S. commander in Iraq and became the figure most identified with the new strategy. But if Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, was the public face of the troop buildup, he was only its adoptive parent. It was Odierno, since September the U.S. commander in Iraq, who was the surge's true father.
In arguing for an increase in U.S. forces in Iraq, Odierno went up against the collective powers at the top of the military establishment. As late as December 2006, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was privately telling his colleagues that he didn't see that 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could do anything that 140,000 weren't doing. The month before, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of Central Command, told a Senate hearing that he and every general he had asked opposed sending more U.S. forces to Iraq. "I do not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem," Abizaid emphasized.
Read the full article here.
Part Two, “Petraeus’s Battles: A Military Tactician’s Political Strategy”
February 9, 2009 - As Gen. David H. Petraeus flew into Baghdad in February 2007, preparing to take command of U.S. forces in Iraq, Col. Peter R. Mansoor, his executive officer, knelt alongside his seat. "You know, sir," he said, "the hardest thing for you, if it comes to it, will be to tell the American people and the president that this isn't working."
The general said nothing in response. "But he heard it," Mansoor remembers. And he nodded.
Petraeus arrived for his third tour in Iraq to execute the "surge" strategy developed by Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno and outlined by President George W. Bush a few weeks earlier: 30,000 additional troops, new counterinsurgency tactics, and a mission to protect the population and bring security to a country verging on civil war, with the hope that political reconciliation would follow.
But however daunting his military mission, Petraeus faced no less arduous a political challenge: an impatient American public weary of Iraq, a Democratic Congress bent on ending the war, and a military chain of command eager to draw down forces and suspicious of the Princeton-educated commander who had the ear of the president.
It would be his success on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon as well as in the court of public opinion that would determine the fate of the surge as much as anything that happened in Baghdad. Petraeus proved to be a master on every front.
Throughout his time in Iraq, Petraeus bypassed the chain of command and answered directly to Bush, with whom he held weekly videoconferences from Baghdad. He waged -- and won -- the political fights at home by discreetly but unmistakably downgrading U.S. goals for Iraq, by facing down congressional Democrats, and by winning more time for the new strategy to take hold.
In effect, Petraeus helped lay the groundwork for a much more prolonged engagement in Iraq. The surge itself would last 18 months, with the last of the five additional brigades leaving last summer. But what neither he nor Bush had articulated -- and what lawmakers, the public and even some high up the military chain of command did not recognize -- was that the new strategy was in fact a road map for what military planners called "the long war."
The strategy envisioned a series of stages: First would come increased security. Then, political progress, and with it the creation of a reliable Iraqi army and police force. And all that, even if everything went as planned, could take many, many years.
For Petraeus and Odierno, his second in command, one key to buying time in 2007 was to scale back the Bush administration's ambitions of turning Iraq into a beacon of democracy for the Middle East.
In the course of several weeks that year, "we redefined success in a much more modest way as 'sustainable stability,' " explained Emma Sky, a top adviser to Odierno.
"We're not after the holy grail in Iraq; we're not after Jeffersonian democracy," Petraeus later told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "We're after conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage."
Another necessity was showing some successes. "The Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock," he said in a television interview a few weeks after taking over as commander in Iraq. "So we're obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps . . . put a little more time on the Washington clock."
Read the full article here.
Related:Topic(s): Iraq, Regional Security Challenges, Terrorism & Irregular Warfare, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Military Forces & Operations
Project(s): Future of the U.S. Military, The Iraq Inheritance, Writers in Residence
People: Thomas E. Ricks
