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...

More at The Washington Post.

Command Sergeant Major Jeffrey J. Mellinger assumed the duties of the U.S. Army Materiel Command's Command Sergeant Major on Nov. 2, 2007. CSM Mellinger was previously assigned to the U.S. Army Alaska and spent several months speaking to units and groups on his experiences.

CSM Mellinger was drafted on April 18, 1972, at Eugene, Oregon. Following basic and advanced training at Fort Ord, California, he completed airborne training at Fort Benning, Georgia. His first assignment was in the Federal Republic of Germany as a unit clerk. Upon his return from Germany, CSM Mellinger was assigned to the 2d Battalion (Ranger), 75th Infantry, Fort Lewis, Washington. For the next five years, CSM Mellinger served as unit clerk, battalion personnel staff NCO, machinegun squad leader, rifle squad leader, rifle platoon sergeant and weapons platoon leader. He then performed drill sergeant duty at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and returned to the 2nd Ranger Battalion, serving again as a platoon sergeant.

Additional assignments include: Special Forces Military Freefall Instructor, Fort Bragg, North Carolina; senior team leader, 75th Ranger Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment, Fort Benning, Georgia; assistant professor of Military Science, University of Alaska-Fairbanks; First Sergeant, Company C (Airborne), 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry (Manchu), Fort Wainwright, Alaska; Senior Enlisted Advisor, 41st Separate Infantry Brigade, Oregon Army National Guard; Command Sergeant Major, 3rd Battalion, 10th Infantry, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; Command Sergeant Major, 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia; Commandant, U.S. Army Alaska Noncommissioned Officer's Academy, Fort Richardson, Alaska; Command Sergeant Major of United States Army Japan and 9th Theater Support Command, Camp Zama, Japan; Command Sergeant Major, First U.S. Army, Fort Gillem, Georgia; and Command Sergeant Major, Multi-National Force--Iraq from August 2004-May 2007.

Command Sergeant Major Jeffrey J. Mellinger - Official Biography

America's Last Draftee: "I'm a Relic" - Mark Thompson, Time

America's generals love to brag about their all-volunteer Army. That's because they tend to overlook Jeffrey Mellinger. He donned his Army uniform for the first time on April 18, 1972, about the time the Nixon Administration was seeking "peace with honor" in Vietnam and The Godfather was opening on the silver screen. Nearly 37 years later, he's still wearing Army green. Mellinger is, by all accounts, the last active-duty draftee serving in the U.S. Army...

The Army sent him all over the world, including tours in Japan and Iraq. General David Petraeus, who served as Mellinger's boss during the draftee's final three months in Iraq in 2007, calls him "a national asset" who kept the top generals' aware of the peaks and valleys in battlefield morale. "We lost count of how many times his personal convoy was hit," Petraeus says. "Yet he never stopped driving the roads, walking patrols, and going on missions with our troopers." (Mellinger's 33-month Iraq tour was punctuated by 27 roadside bombings, including two that destroyed his vehicle, although he managed to escape injury.) Mellinger now serves as the Command Sergeant Major, the senior enlisted man in the Virginia headquarters of the Army Materiel Command, trying to shrink what he calls the "flash-to-bang time" between recognizing what soldiers need and getting it to them...

He doesn't have much patience for those, like Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who want to bring back the draft to ensure that war's burdens are equally shared. "We're doing just fine, thank you, with the all-volunteer force," Mellinger says. "Until the time comes that we're in danger of losing our capabilities to do our missions, then we ought to stick with what we have — there is no need for the draft." ...

Much more at Time.

The Generals' Insurgency: The Story Behind the U.S. Troop Surge in Iraq - Washington Post. Follow the link for the story behind the story on Tom Ricks' latest book - The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. Includes key documents, key players, timeline, video, and related content.

The Gamble will be released on 10 February 2009.

Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began.

Since early 2007 a new military order has directed American strategy. Some top U.S. officials now in Iraq actually opposed the 2003 invasion, and almost all are severely critical of how the war was fought from then through 2006. At the core of the story is General David Petraeus, a military intellectual who has gathered around him an unprecedented number of officers with both combat experience and Ph.D.s. Underscoring his new and unorthodox approach, three of his key advisers are quirky foreigners—an Australian infantryman-turned- anthropologist, an antimilitary British woman who is an expert in the Middle East, and a Mennonite-educated Palestinian pacifist.

The Gamble offers new breaking information, revealing behind-the-scenes disagreements between top commanders. We learn that almost every single officer in the chain of command fought the surge. Many of Petraeus's closest advisers went to Iraq extremely pessimistic, doubting that the surge would have any effect, and his own boss was so skeptical that he dispatched an admiral to Baghdad in the summer of 2007 to come up with a strategy to replace Petraeus's. That same boss later flew to Iraq to try to talk Petraeus out of his planned congressional testimony. The Gamble examines the congressional hearings through the eyes of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and their views of the questions posed by the 2008 presidential candidates.

For Petraeus, prevailing in Iraq means extending the war. Thomas E. Ricks concludes that the war is likely to last another five to ten years—and that that outcome is a best case scenario. His stunning conclusion, stated in the last line of the book, is that "the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered by us and by the world have not yet happened."

Thomas E. Ricks is The Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, where he has covered the U.S. military since 2000. Until the end of 1999 he held the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize- winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of Fiasco, Making the Corps, and A Soldier's Duty.

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 US 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 US 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 US 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.

Much more at The Washington Post.

A foretaste of what would be in store for President Hamid Karzai after the election of a new American administration came last February, when Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator, sat down to a formal dinner at the palace during a visit here.

Between platters of lamb and rice, Mr. Biden and two other American senators questioned Mr. Karzai about corruption in his government, which, by many estimates, is among the worst in the world. Mr. Karzai assured Mr. Biden and the other senators that there was no corruption at all and that, in any case, it was not his fault.

The senators gaped in astonishment. After 45 minutes, Mr. Biden threw down his napkin and stood up.

"This dinner is over," Mr. Biden announced, according to one of the people in the room at the time. And the three senators walked out, long before the appointed time.

Today, of course, Mr. Biden is the vice president.

More at The New York Times.

The Insurgent Who Loved 'Titanic' - Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post

This excerpt was taken from The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008.

Capt. Samuel Cook, who was commanding the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment's C troop in the northern Tigris Valley in Salahuddin Province had been pursuing the local leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, whom he considered a "very passionate, eloquent speaker, well educated." The terrorist leader offered to talk, and Cook took him up on it. "He was tired of being on the run, and he no longer believed in what he had once been preaching," Cook said. He provided information on the whereabouts of a higher al Qaeda leader for the province, who was killed in a firefight two weeks later. He also told them that al Qaeda in Iraq had three major sources of funding: crime, the Kurds, and the Iranians. Cook would use this information adroitly, asking local Sunni insurgents why they thought al Qaeda was their friend, if it was on the payroll of the dreaded Persian power. The insurgents, who had affiliated with al Qaeda as the surge began to hit them, also were growing tired, Cook recalled.

Cook had a light touch. In December 2007, he sent a letter to the community wishing them a happy Eid al- Fitr, a festival that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and one of the most significant Muslim holidays. At the beginning of the Eid feast, he met with the al Qaeda man, telling him that he had enough evidence to detain him. The man responded that Cook was wading into a fight between tribes, implying that he didn't understand the situation. Cook countered, "We have far too many reports from people in your own tribe to make this a tribal affair." Cook then told the man and some sheikhs who had waited outside that the reconciliation process is not easy and that the al Qaeda man and he disagreed on his guilt, but that out of respect for the Eid holiday, he wouldn't detain him at this time. As Cook hoped, those three actions - the letter, the meeting, and the show of respect - persuaded other insurgents to come see the thoughtful American...

More at The Washington Post.

David Kilcullen is the author of The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. In his new book, Kilcullen attempts to disentangle the global "war on terror" from the array of small wars that originate from unique local circumstances. Kilcullen is a retired Australian army officer, holds a Ph.D., and was a top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad and to the U.S. State Department. He is also one of the most popular contributors to Small Wars Journal, which collected his writings here.

Thomas P.M. Barnett, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and an advisor to the U.S. government, has authored Great Powers: America and the World After Bush. In this book, Barnett attempts to get his audience to consider what America's grand strategy should be, taking into account not only U.S. military and economic power, but also America's cultural reach and the influence it has had over the past century. Barnett discussed his new book in this Small Wars Journal interview.

Mullen Addresses Need for 'Whole Government' Approach

By Jim Garamone

American Forces Press Service

All portions of the U.S. government have a role in dealing with any instability that results from the world's financial crisis, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said here yesterday

Navy Adm. Mike Mullen gave a public talk sponsored by Princeton University and its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, visited with the college's ROTC detachment and participated in a roundtable discussion with the faculty.

In his remarks, the chairman expressed concern about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

"What is overarching is the global financial crisis," Mullen said. "I worry a great deal as we work our way through this -- and I think it's going to take longer rather than shorter to do that. I worry about the effect that will have on instability throughout the world."

The chairman noted that throughout history, the United States hasn't been good about predicting where instability will occur. "As this crisis really takes hold, there will be places that become unstable that we haven't anticipated," he said. "We need a whole-of-government approach."

The United States military is a force for freedom and good in the world, Mullen said, but it's not the solution to every problem. "The United States military is necessary, but it is not sufficient alone," Mullen said. He pointed out that the American military is stretched and is doing missions that servicemembers have not been trained to do.

"They are an incredible group of young people who are incredibly adaptive and creative and innovative, and they do this unbelievably well," he said. "But we need to back off of that over time."

Other Cabinet-level departments -- State, Treasury, Commerce, Justice -- have the proper expertise for "soft-power" missions and need to have personnel able to deploy to address these problems, Mullen said. "But in my opinion," he added, "we are a good decade away from creating a capability in our other departments."

For example, he said, employees in the Agriculture Department do not expect to deploy to Afghanistan. "So I've got soldiers in the [National] Guard who are farmers in Texas and Missouri and Iowa, and they are going to Afghanistan to work on agriculture because it is what we need, because that's the economic base of the country," he said.

In a later interview, the chairman used Iraq as an example. One of the lessons of that conflict, he said, has been the multiplying effect that State Department officials serving at joint security stations have had on the situation. State officials are experts in governance and negotiation in a way that military personnel are not, the admiral said, yet in the first call for civilian volunteers to serve in Iraq, "half of them were from the Department of Defense, which is another extension of the military, and these are people who are available and accept orders and go do it."

Mullen said the government must work to generate the necessary capacity to bring soft-power expertise into implementation of U.S. foreign policy. "And we're going to need it right now," he said. "The president, the leaders of agencies, everybody has to be committed to generating this capacity down through the agencies."

Mullen told the Princeton audience that there are plenty of places to serve, and that the world needs the expertise and commitment of Americans.

"In my view, it is at the base of who we are -- when we are in trouble, to be able to rise up and serve and make a difference," he said. "You can serve in our own country or globally, but you are needed."

The United States needs to develop the capacity to conduct complex operations that require close civil-military planning and cooperation in the field. This study is comprehensive review of this national need and examines how the need can best be met.

Its main conclusion is that current efforts to build a civilian response capacity for complex operations are unfinished and that the Obama administration needs to dedicate additional attention, including new legislation and resources, to complete the task. It recommends what civilian capacity to build, how much of it is needed, and how to manage and organize it.

Here are the major findings by chapter:

Chapter 1 concludes that complex operations encompass 6 broad categories of missions, with 60 associated tasks, 48 of which in 5 categories are probably best performed by civilians. This chapter finds that 5,000 deployable, active-duty government civilians and 10,000 civilian reserves would be needed to perform these 48 tasks on a sustained basis in one large, one medium, and four small contingencies. In today's global security environment, structuring civilian and military capabilities to meet this 1--1--4 standard is prudent. This requirement substantially exceeds current executive branch planning assumptions, which call for 2,250 active-duty civilians and 2,000 civilian reservists.

Chapter 2 finds that lead agency and lead individual approaches are inadequate to deal with complex missions involving multiple departments and agencies. It recommends the use of "empowered cross-functional teams" with sufficient authority and resources to control departmental and agency activities within the scope of specific mandates. The National Security Council's oversight role also needs to be strengthened.

Chapter 3 concludes that DOD has adjusted well to its new, complex missions since 2003; that, in anticipation of constricting defense budgets, DOD needs to invest in high-end military capabilities; and that, as a result, DOD needs its civilian partners to build up their capacity to conduct complex operations. Recently, DOD has enhanced its authorities to deploy its own civilians, should other departments fail to deliver. DOD plans to organize and train these personnel should be more closely coordinated with similar planning by the State Department.

Chapter 4 recommends that the State Department concentrate on developing "S&R--savvy" diplomats, who should be plugged directly into "seventh-floor" executive crisis management activities. It further recommends that key interagency planning and operational functions should be moved out of the State Department to a new interagency coordinator, allowing it to more strategically target its resources for diplomatic readiness needs in underserved regions. Taken together, the findings in chapters 2 and 4 lead to the conclusion that a new, empowered cross-functional interagency team should inherit several of the functions of S/CRS.

Chapter 5 suggests that USAID should be the operational agency charged with training and equipping civilians for complex missions. This will require doubling its personnel strength and endowing it with new authorities akin to those associated in the past with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and new funding to reimburse other agencies that provide personnel for overseas deployment. USAID also will need to undergo a significant cultural change. To promote that change, and to reflect its new mission, USAID might be renamed the Agency for Development and Reconstruction (USADR). The reconstituted USAID/USADR might have two basic divisions, one for each major function.

Chapter 6 demonstrates that domestic civilian agencies and the Intelligence Community have significant skills that would prove most useful to the successful completion of a complex operation. But overcoming bureaucratic, structural, and cultural barriers of domestic agencies may require special legislation. Domestic civilian agencies should be given a statutory mission to participate in overseas complex operations, just as many of them now have with respect to domestic contingencies, as well as modest budget increases to tie their new responsibilities into existing capacity deployment programs. The Intelligence Community is preoccupied with counterterrorism operations, and additional assets are needed to enable greater contributions to complex operations.

Chapter 7 notes that the use of contractors in U.S. military operations has been a constructive factor since the Revolutionary War. But the ratio of contractors to military personnel is at an all-time high, with the consequence that Federal departments and agencies are losing core competencies, contractors are not well supervised, and cost efficiencies may be less than estimated. The chapter recommends dropping the presumption that favors outsourcing civilian tasks in complex operations, instead increasing the government civilian workforce in some agencies and improving contractor oversight.

Chapter 8 assesses how the Federal Government might organize itself to educate and train the many civilians needed for future complex missions. Efforts to provide this education were initiated in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review but have stalled, in part because the demand for new educational programs has not been fully articulated or resourced and is resisted by those departments and agencies in which education has little traditional support. This chapter recommends that the incoming administration direct efforts to define and develop the learning elements of the emerging national security operations. This will require dedication and a commitment to resourcing across the executive branch and will call for the establishment of a new academic entity for this purpose, possibly at National Defense University.

Chapter 9 estimates the total cost of the required civilian capacity discussed in the first eight chapters to be about $2 billion annually. Some of these costs are already embedded in current executive branch budget requests. New approaches, such as a combined national security budget presentation, may be needed to enhance congressional support for these funds.

Chapter 10 discusses how the needed civilian capacity should connect to its military counterpart in an overseas operation. It concludes that important efforts at civil-military integration and cooperation have taken place within the confines of the military, but that these do not address the fundamental problem of the absence of civilian infrastructure to lead U.S. efforts during complex operations. The chapter recommends the creation of new regional Ambassadors' Councils, surge capacity to absorb interagency influx at key Embassies, and easier civilian access to military transportation and materiel during a crisis.

Chapter 11 reminds us that homeland security events, such as the response to Hurricane Katrina and management of the consequences of a major terrorist attack, are also complex operations that require collaboration and skill sets similar to those needed in overseas operations. DOD will likely never be the lead agency in the homeland, given constitutional and legal constraints. Issues of state sovereignty and the unique relationship between a governor and a state's National Guard—in other than Title 10 status—preclude a traditional command and control relationship, even within the uniformed community. Add Federal/state/local/tribal, and even private-sector entities to the mix, and complexity goes off the chart. Nonetheless, the synergies between homeland and overseas complex operations need better development to take full advantage of the similarities.

Chapter 12 notes that overseas complex operations are seldom undertaken by the United States alone, and that the civilian capacities of other nations should be harnessed at an early stage. Key international institutions include the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the European Union, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Recent experience in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan indicates that coordination among these institutions has been inadequate, and that a "comprehensive approach" is needed. NATO is seeking to develop such a comprehensive approach with the European Union, but Turkey and Cyprus tend to veto such cooperation within their respective organizations, to the detriment of ongoing operations. A major effort is needed to address this problem.

Chapter 13 reminds readers that connecting with nongovernmental organizations and a broad representation of local actors is critical to success in complex operations. In fact, unless we are able to engage effectively with indigenous populations, we cannot achieve the political, social, and economic goals for which the military was committed in the first place. This chapter highlights six key steps to promote engagement with local actors. Success may depend on early engagement and planning, enabled by open communications networks with maximum sharing of unclassified information with civilians, an area that needs more emphasis.

Civilian Surge: Key to Complex Operations - Full Report by CTNSP.