Prison Break

Prison Break: Maybe the Army’s Not So Hidebound Afterall by Fred Kaplan at Slate.

On April 23, I wrote a column (Gates Celebrates Dissent) that turns out to have been mistaken—that, I’ve since found out, underestimated the U.S. Army’s capacity to reward its creative dissidents…

I concluded the column: “[A]s long as junior officers see (as Gates put it) ‘principled, creative, reform-minded leaders’ like Paul Yingling assigned to lowly positions, the military will not nourish many more.”

It turns out that I was wrong on two points. First, contrary to my implication, Yingling’s battalion was not sent to prison-guard duty as a punishment. There isn’t much demand these days for artillery fire in Iraq or Afghanistan. Still, artillery battalions have to do something…

More crucial (and here is where some good news enters the picture), “detainee operations” in Iraq have become a lot more important—and more innovative—than they used to be. With no fanfare, they have become a key element in the broader counterinsurgency campaign. If Yingling was singled out for his current job, it was in recognition—not in grudge-slinging defiance—of his talents. And, in fact, it seems that he was singled out.

This morning, I spoke with Maj. Gen. Doug Stone, commanding general of Task Force 134, which runs detainee operations in Iraq. On the speaker phone with him was his deputy commander, Paul Yingling.

About a year ago, Stone told me, he and Gen. David Petraeus realized that something had to be done about the detention centers in Iraq. There were two centers, holding a total of 26,000 detainees, and the few jihadists among them were indoctrinating a large share of the rest. “It was becoming Jihadi U. in there,” Stone said.

Stone set out to apply counterinsurgency principles inside the centers’ walls…

More at Slate and Abu Muqawama.

More on “counterinsurgency inside the wire” at MountainRunner.

Update: With a hat tip to David Ucko – Bloggers’ Roundtable With Gen. Douglas M. Stone, Washington Post transcript.