The Army You Have

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)