An Army board headed by Gen. David H. Petraeus has selected several combat-tested counterinsurgency experts for promotion to the rank of brigadier general, sifting through more than 1,000 colonels to identify a handful of innovative leaders who will shape the future Army, according to current and former senior Army officers.

The choices suggest that the unusual decision to put the top U.S. officer in Iraq in charge of the promotions board has generated new thinking on the qualities of a successful Army officer -- and also deepened Petraeus's imprint on the Army. Petraeus, who spent nearly four of the past five years in Iraq and has seen many of the colonels in action there, faces confirmation hearings next week to take charge of Central Command, which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia...

They include Special Forces Col. Ken Tovo, a veteran of multiple Iraq tours who recently led a Special Operations task force there; Col. H.R. McMaster, a senior Petraeus adviser known for leading a successful counterinsurgency effort in the Iraqi city of Tall Afar, and Col. Sean MacFarland, who created a network of patrol bases in Ramadi that helped curb violence in the capital of Anbar Province, according to the officers...

More:

Proper Promotions - Max Boot, Contentions

McMaster Promoted, Finally... - Abu Muqawama, Abu Muqawama

This is Promising News - David Betz, Kings of War

The New Generalship - Mark Safranski, ZenPundit

By Major Joseph A. Jackson

General Colin Powell's recent visit to the Command and General Staff College reminded us that history, if not repetitive, is at least parallel in its dimensions. To fully grasp what leadership and the concept of a life spent in service to the Nation means, one need look no further than to the laurels and accomplishments that mark General Powell's service. However, as General Powell mentioned, the attainment of accolades, high office, and material rewards reflect the simple, timeless, and real values that underpin our institution at the Command and General Staff College.

A veteran of two tours in Vietnam, General Powell shared the insights imparted by his journey through history. Then, as now, CGSC stands as a bastion of learning in turbulent and ambiguous times. Our institution does not promise that academics alone or a single methodology will ever triumph; rather it proposes that capable individuals grounded in relevant axioms can hone their mental agility and will deduce the clearest path to shape successful outcomes. We know that our values -- Army Values -- of which General Powell spoke, work because we have seen them in action. The values that were in instilled when General Powell's class was in attendance then do not vary greatly from those we promulgate now. The testing grounds for these values are the rotations between Iraq and Afghanistan in places with names that sound decidedly foreign here in the Midwest -- Kabul, Ghardez, Baghdad, and Ar Ramadi. Forty years ago, Hue, Be Luong, and the A-Shau Valley of General Powell's experience would have sounded equally as exotic. Conflict forces us to re-evaluate and reinvigorate ourselves with our core principles despite the time or place.

General Powell's words and his selection of topics resonate beyond the vaulted ceilings of Eisenhower Auditorium. They resound in the classrooms where we students remain hard at work solving fictitious problems for service in a world of often cold, hard facts. Succinctly, General Powell charged us to remember that just as those leaders who preceded us, we serve in a time of great challenge. The challenges that General Powell's generation faced were a nation divided politically over the morality of the war in Vietnam and a culture further separated by racial tensions. Today, we are a society wrestling with the moral issues of a protracted war abroad, domestic border security issues, and financial insecurity at home.

Yet, as tomorrow's senior leaders, we see equally that along with these difficult issues there is great opportunity. As students we recognize that the dilemmas we face are not necessarily unique to our time but have parallels in our military history. The United States and its Officer Corps continue to serve as a model and a beacon for others to follow. Further, we acknowledge that we are a resilient and dynamic culture that prizes the timeless values of equality and the rule of law. Finally, General Powell's visit reminds us to acknowledge that the common sense values of our institutions mirror the uncommon experience that is our composite American culture.

Major Joseph A. Jackson, US Army, is a student at the US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

By Geoffrey C. Lambert, Major General (Ret.), US Army

From the 1960's through the 1980's, those of us in the US Army Special Forces, along with our interagency partners, successfully stunted communist-sponsored insurgencies throughout Latin America. One of our prouder moments was in 1967, when Bolivian solders, trained, equipped and guided by Green Berets and the CIA, captured and killed Che Guevara.

From Guatemala to Chile, we taught our allies to defeat insurgency by destroying key nodes and personalities in insurgent networks, countering communist propaganda, developing internal security measures and population control, sharing intelligence with regional partners, and suppressing leftist movements.

The dictators we supported grasped our instruction and went into action with total freedom of action, unfettered by moral or legal limitations. As a result, counterinsurgency turned ugly as anti-communist zeal led to the imprisonment, torture or death of innocents among the thousands that perished in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and throughout the region. Sadly, it wasn't until the Carter Administration and the War in El Salvador that human rights became a cornerstone of U.S. counterinsurgency planning and execution.

Today, we see the Children of the Left, now adults, (whose parents were disenfranchised or worse) finding their voices in Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and elsewhere. As a result, Latin America is increasingly drifting towards building new economic, diplomatic and military relationships, diminishing US influence in the region.

As we continue our struggle against radical Islamic terrorism, expanding the effort to our allies and coalition partners, we need to remember the Children of the Left. Our 20,000+ prisoners in Iraq, the death of innocent civilians, the loss of face of the many men now unemployed in a culture that values the man's role as bread-winner more that we can understand, and our status as occupiers and Crusaders collectively may result in conditions far worse than the situation in Latin America today.

As we begin our exit from Iraq and begin focusing on building host nation counterinsurgency capability in Iraq and other countries, analysis of long term implications of seeking only short-term gain may provide insight to allow us to match word and deed in the upcoming decades to minimize long-term blowback -- blowback from the Children of the Crusade.

During Unified Quest 09, The US Army Title 10 war game, there was discussion of the long term effects of the US counterinsurgency effort in Latin America, which led to this commentary.

A Response to Bob Cassidy's Recent SWJ Post

By LTC Gian P. Gentile

The United States lost the war in Vietnam because it was unwinnable. One of the best books on the history of American involvement in Vietnam by historian George Herring stated just that. But we keep trying to rescue the Vietnam War from its impossibility by turning it into a "better war." There was no "better war" in Vietnam.

America's major involvement in the War in Vietnam starting with Westmoreland was as good as it could have gotten. Westmoreland along with the rest of the American Army prior to 1965 had developed a reasonable counterinsurgency doctrine that was understood by senior army leaders. That doctrine was premised on classic counterinsurgency theory. Arguably it was premised a bit too much on "counter-guerilla" warfare as part of an overarching counterinsurgency approach, but the basic tenets of good Coin practices were understood by the American Army on the eve of Vietnam: the importance of the people in COIN, the need to separate the insurgents from the people, etc. In fact Westmoreland's approach as he started the major American involvement in 1965 was premised on the classical notion in COIN of "clear, hold, and build." The strategy Westmoreland devised in 1965 was a reasonable one. He knew the population was the key along with government legitimacy but to get at those two keys he had to provide security. And that security was threatened by regular South Vietnamese communist military outfits and elements of the NVA Army operating in South Vietnam. The notion of having Westmoreland start of the campaign by dispersing American combat outposts of squad and platoon size throughout the countryside is nothing but chimera; they would have been crushed by a Vietcong and NVA enemy that could easily mass in company size and larger formations within South Vietnam. If Abrams would have been put in place as MAC-V commander instead of Westmoreland in 1965 he almost certainly would have adopted the same strategy. When General Abrams replaced Westmoreland in 1968 he did not radically and immediately alter course but instead shifted priorities and placed pacification of the population on top. What allowed Abrams to do this was the fact that the South Vietnamese Vietcong had been decimated by the Tet Offensive and no longer posed a determined threat to dispersed American troops. Abrams was also operating under the political direction to draw-down American forces in Vietnam which required a shift to focusing on South Vietnamese Army forces to carry out counterinsurgency operations with the American military in support with its new priority of the pacification of the countryside. By and large the American Army did the best that it could with the situation that it was presented and the mission assigned in a war that was fundamentally unwinnable. No amount of better "interagency cooperation and function (the term "interagency" by the way is a metaphor for America's Sisyphean attempts to create imperial institutions along the lines of the old British empire) could have rescued it from its inherent impossibility.

Armies exist primarily to fight; that is their most important and basic core competency. The capability to conduct stability operations must flow from that core competency of fighting. Conventional wars are not things of the past. But in so saying this it does not mean that those of us who argue this point believe that the Soviet Union will soon emerge again so that we can go back to 1985 and prepare to fight them at the Fulda Gap reminiscent of the huge tank engagements at the World War II battle of Kursk. No, instead when we argue that conventional wars are not things of the past we mean that there is, to use scholar Frank Hoffman's conception, hybrid enemies out there who can fight along the full spectrum of conflict. The recent Israeli experience in south Lebanon is a clear example of a "hybrid enemy" in Hizbollah who fought Israeli tactical combat units the way small units of German infantry fought the American Army in the Hedgerows of Normandy in World War II. The Israeli Army experience also shows what can happen to ground combat units when their army becomes overly focused on stability operations like the Israelis had in the years preceding in the Palestinian territories.

The notion that the Army's new operational doctrine FM 3-0 treats conventional war and stability operations as equal is a bit off of the mark. In fact in the 11 pages in the chapter that deals with full spectrum operations 7 of those 11 pages are dedicated to stability operations, 2 to offensive operations, and 2 to defensive operations. How is that equal?

The American Army's conventional warfighting capabilities are not a constant. Yet proponents of stability operations often assume that they are and from that point of departure keep hounding the American Army to get better at COIN and stability operations. Their premise is that up to about February 2007 in Iraq the American Army for the most part fumbled at COIN. This assertion is fallacious. Most American combat outfits have been conducting best COIN practices in Iraq since the middle of 2004. For examples of this go back into the past issues of Military Review and see that as far back as 2004 the experience shown in these articles was of American ground units who figured out very quickly that they were not in a "conventional fight," that they were in a counterinsurgency and therefore learned and adapted very quickly to its necessities.

It is wrong to think that American Army's conventional capabilities are at the same level they were in 2001, in fact they have atrophied severely. A recent study by three former Army Combat Brigade Commanders who served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 wrote an analysis for the Chief of Staff of the Army pointing out serious problems with the Army's field artillery branch. After 6 years of counterinsurgency war a key means for the Army to fight conventional war through firepower delivered by artillery has become, to use the words of the colonels, a "dead branch walking."

The "ghosts of Vietnam" actually rest in those who want to fight Vietnam all over again in Iraq. It is time for the American Army to start looking outside of its self-imposed Counterinsurgency box and toward a reasonable and realistic view of the future. For the American Army to remain in this box we are courting huge strategic risks.

Remarks to the Heritage Foundation (Colorado Springs, CO)

As Delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Colorado Springs, Colorado, Tuesday, 13 May 2008.

Excerpts (Emphasis by SWJ):

... There is a good deal of debate and discussion -- within the military, the Congress, and elsewhere -- about whether we are putting too much emphasis on current demands -- in particular, Iraq. And whether this emphasis is creating too much risk in other areas, such as preparing for potential future conflicts; being able to handle a contingency elsewhere in the world; and over stressing the ground forces, in particular the Army.

Much of what we are talking about is a matter of balancing risk: today's demands versus tomorrow's contingencies; irregular and asymmetric threats versus conventional threats. As the world's remaining superpower, we have to be able to dissuade, deter, and, if necessary, respond to challenges across the spectrum.

Nonetheless, I have noticed too much of a tendency towards what might be called "Next-War-itis" -- the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict. This inclination is understandable, given the dominant role the Cold War had in shaping America's peacetime military, where the United States constantly strove to either keep up with or get ahead of another superpower adversary...

But in a world of finite knowledge and limited resources, where we have to make choices and set priorities, it makes sense to lean toward the most likely and lethal scenarios for our military. And it is hard to conceive of any country confronting the United States directly in conventional terms -- ship to ship, fighter to fighter, tank to tank -- for some time to come. The record of the past quarter century is clear: the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Israelis in Lebanon, the United States in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Smaller, irregular forces -- insurgents, guerrillas, terrorists -- will find ways, as they always have, to frustrate and neutralize the advantages of larger, regular militaries. And even nation-states will try to exploit our perceived vulnerabilities in an asymmetric way, rather than play to our inherent strengths.

Overall, the kinds of capabilities we will most likely need in the years ahead will often resemble the kinds of capabilities we need today.

The implication, particularly for America's ground forces, means we must institutionalize the lessons learned and capabilities honed from the ongoing conflicts. Many of these skills and tasks used to be the province of the Special Forces, but now are a core of the Army and Marine Corps as a whole...

For years to come, the Air Force and the Navy will be America's main strategic deterrent. We need to modernize our ageing inventory of aircraft, and build out a fleet of ships that right now is the smallest we've had since the late 1930s. These forces provide the strategic flexibility we need to deter, and if necessary, respond to, other competitors...

A few words about global risk -- the threats we face elsewhere in the world while America's ground forces are concentrated on Iraq...

Today's strategic context is completely different. While America's military was being bled in Vietnam, a superpower with vast fleets of tanks, bombers, fighters, and nuclear weapons was poised to overrun Western Europe -- then the central theater in that era's long twilight struggle. Not so today...

Full transcript.

Gates Urges Military to Focus on Current Wars - Josh White, Washington Post

Gates Says New Arms Must Play Role Now - Thom Shanker, New York Times

Gates Urges Focus on Needs in Iraq, Afghanistan - Julian Barnes, Los Angeles Times

Gates on Low-Intensity Warfare - Max Boot, Contentions

That's Why Abu Muqawama Loves You, Bobby - Abu Muqawama

Gates' Speech at Colorado Springs - David Betz, Kings of War

By Bob Cassidy

The recent spate of posts and editorial pieces that have amplified the emerging debate between counterinsurgency advocates and big conventional war advocates, coupled with Phillip Carter's 12 May Washington Post Online post, "Vietnam Ghosts," compelled me to post these links (below) to three studies that were published between 1970 and 1980. These studies testified to why the U.S. Government (USG) and the U.S. military failed to achieve their objectives in Vietnam. Also, because the USG and the U.S. military failed to heed, absorb, and institutionalize the lessons derived in these analyses during the two decades following the last study (BDM), the USG was initially ill prepared to counter the insurgencies it confronted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, the 28 November 2005 Department of Defense Directive (DODD) 3000.05, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations DODD 3000.05, the extant work by USSOCOM and the USMC on the re-emerging notion of irregular warfare (IW JOC), and the latest version (February 2008) of the U.S. Army's capstone manual, FM 3-0, Operations, together prescribe an emphasis on irregular warfare, stability operations, and counterinsurgency, equal to that of regular, conventional, war. These documents help provide the requisite philosophical and doctrinal balance for a military that must be able to conduct both counterinsurgency and conventional big wars.

Since it generally requires up to 12 years, ultimately, to prevail when prosecuting counterinsurgency, and, because it takes between five to ten years to change military cultural preferences, the USG and U.S. military can ill afford to revert to an almost exclusive military cultural focus on big war, as they certainly did following Vietnam. To recapitulate the essence of these three studies in distilled form, the USG and the U.S. military did not succeed in Vietnam because they failed to integrate the interagency within a unified effort and purpose to prosecute the counterinsurgency in Vietnam, they failed to understand the nature of the war they were fighting, and the U.S. military's cultural preference, and almost sole focus, for big conventional war precluded (impeded) it from adapting to prosecute counterinsurgency successfully. While U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have witnessed some significant successes during the last two years, it is still not completely certain that the American military's culture, doctrine, and organization changed with sufficient celerity to ultimately succeed. But, it currently seems that these changes were effected just in time. However, in future permutations of this long irregular war, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and their ilk, will not likely elect to fight the U.S. with methods that approximate "head-on tank battles." For this reason, it would be exceedingly prudent to sustain the recently achieved co-equal emphasis on both irregular and regular warfare that has been absent heretofore. Perhaps, now, the USG and the U.S. military, with their concomitant organizational and cultural preferences, are genuinely on the verge of expunging the ghosts of Vietnam.

Links:

1. A Study of Strategic Lessons Learned in Vietnam (Omnibus Executive Summary) - BDM Corporation, 9 March 1981.

2. The Unchangeable War - Brian M. Jenkins, Rand, November 1970.

3. Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance in Vietnam -- R. W. Komer, Rand, August 1972.

Post-Script: Note Appendix A (Asymmetries in the Second Indochina War) and Appendix C (Characteristics of the American Way of War) in the Executive Summary of the 1980 BDM report, A Study of the Strategic Lessons of Vietnam. Some of these salient points, surprisingly, still resonate today if one takes a hard, introspective look, at the American military and the enemies it faces.

SWJ Editors' Links:

The Ghosts of Vietnam - Richard Fernandez, The Belmont Club

Discuss at Small Wars Council