Iraq-style counterinsurgency is fast becoming the US Army's organizing principle. Is our military preparing to fight the next war, or the last one?

For a military accustomed to quick, easy victories, the trials and tribulations of the Iraq War have come as a rude awakening. To its credit, the officer corps has responded not with excuses but with introspection. One result, especially evident within the US Army, has been the beginning of a Great Debate of sorts.

Anyone who cares about the Army's health should take considerable encouragement from this intellectual ferment. Yet anyone who cares about future US national-security strategy should view the debate with considerable concern: it threatens to encroach upon matters that civilian policy makers, not soldiers, should decide.

What makes this debate noteworthy is not only its substance, but its character—the who and the how.

The military remains a hierarchical organization in which orders come from the top down. Yet as the officer corps grapples with its experience in Iraq, fresh ideas are coming from the bottom up. In today's Army, the most-creative thinkers are not generals but mid-career officers—lieutenant colonels and colonels.

Like any bureaucracy, today's military prefers to project a united front when dealing with the outside world, keeping internal dissent under wraps. Nonetheless, the Great Debate is unfolding in plain view in publications outside the Pentagon's purview, among them print magazines such as Armed Forces Journal, the Web-based Small Wars Journal, and the counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama.

The chief participants in this debate - all Iraq War veterans - fixate on two large questions. First, why, after its promising start, did Operation Iraqi Freedom go so badly wrong? Second, how should the hard-earned lessons of Iraq inform future policy? Hovering in the background of this Iraq-centered debate is another war that none of the debaters experienced personally - namely, Vietnam.

The protagonists fall into two camps: Crusaders and Conservatives...

Much more at The Atlantic.

Discuss at Small Wars Council.

Bio

Steve Coll is President & CEO of New America Foundation, and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Previously he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper's managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He is author six books, including The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the SEC's battle with Wall Street (with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008).

Mr. Coll's professional awards include two Pulitzer Prizes. He won the first of these, for explanatory journalism, in 1990, for his series, with David A. Vise, about the SEC. His second was awarded in 2005, for his book, Ghost Wars, which also won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross award; the Overseas Press Club award and the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book published on international affairs during 2004. Other awards include the 1992 Livingston Award for outstanding foreign reporting; the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone; and a second Overseas Press Club Award for international magazine writing.

Selected Books

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

Latest at The New Yorker

The General's Dilemma

Early in 2007, when David Petraeus became Commanding General of United States and international forces in Iraq, he had in mind a strategy to manage the political pressures he would face because of the unpopularity of the war, then four years old, and of its author, George W. Bush. He pledged to be responsive to "both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue"—to his Commander-in-Chief in the White House, of course, but also to antiwar Democrats on Capitol Hill. Petraeus earned a doctoral degree at Princeton University in 1987; the title of his dissertation was "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam." In thinking about how to cope with political divisions in the United States over Iraq, he was influenced, he told me recently, by Samuel Huntington's 1957 book "The Soldier and the State," which argues that civilian control over the military can best be achieved when uniformed officers regard themselves as impartial professionals. Petraeus is registered to vote as a Republican in New Hampshire—he once described himself to a friend as a northeastern Republican, in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller—but he said that around 2002, after he became a two-star general, he stopped voting. As he departed for Baghdad, to oversee a "surge" deployment of additional American troops to Iraq, he sought, as he recalled it, "to try to avoid being pulled in one direction or another, to be in a sense used by one side or the other." He added, "That's very hard to do, because you become at some point sort of the face of the surge. So be it. You just have to deal with that."

Much more at The New Yorker.

Think Tank - Steve Coll's blog at The New Yorker

Part 1 - Doubt, Distrust, Delay.

During the summer of 2006, from her office adjacent to the White House, deputy national security adviser Meghan O'Sullivan sent President Bush a daily top secret report cataloging the escalating bloodshed and chaos in Iraq. "Violence has acquired a momentum of its own and is now self-sustaining," she wrote July 20, quoting from an intelligence assessment.

Her dire evaluation contradicted the upbeat assurances that President Bush was hearing from Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the US commander in Iraq. Casey and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were pushing to draw down American forces and speed the transfer of responsibility to the Iraqis. Despite months of skyrocketing violence, Casey insisted that within a year, Iraq would be mostly stable, with the bulk of American combat troops headed home.

Publicly, the president claimed the United States was winning the war, and he expressed unwavering faith in Casey, saying, "It's his judgment that I rely upon." Privately, he was losing confidence in the drawdown strategy. He questioned O'Sullivan that summer with increasing urgency: "What are you hearing from people in Baghdad? What are people's daily lives like?"

Part 2 - Outmaneuvered And Outranked, Military Chiefs Became Outsiders

At the Joint Chiefs of Staff in late November 2006, Gen. Peter Pace was facing every chairman's nightmare: a potential revolt of the other chiefs. Two months earlier, the JCS had convened a special team of colonels to recommend options for reversing the deteriorating situation in Iraq. Now, it appeared that the chiefs' and colonels' advice was being marginalized, if not ignored, by the White House.

During a JCS meeting with the colonels Nov. 20, Chairman Pace dropped a bomb: The White House was considering a "surge" of additional troops to quell the violence in Iraq. "Would it be a good idea?" Pace asked the group. "If so, what would you do with five more brigades?" That amounted to 20,000 to 30,000 more troops, depending on the number of support personnel.

Part 3 - 'You're Not Accountable, Jack'

Retired Army Gen. Jack Keane came to the White House on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007, to deliver a strong and sober message. The military chain of command, he told Vice President Cheney, wasn't on the same page as the current US commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus. The tension threatened to undermine Petraeus's chances of continued success, Keane said.

Keane, a former vice chief of the Army, was 63, 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds, with a boxer's face framed by tightly cropped hair. As far as Cheney was concerned, Keane was outstanding -- an experienced soldier who had maintained great Pentagon contacts, had no ax to grind and had been a mentor to Petraeus. Keane was all meat and potatoes; he didn't inflate expectations or waste Cheney's time.

By the late summer of 2007, Keane had established an unusual back-channel relationship with the president and vice president, a kind of shadow general advising them on the Iraq war. This September visit was the fifth back-channel briefing that Keane had given the vice president that year.

Part 4 - A Portrait of a Man Defined by His Wars

Five days before Christmas 2001, a little more than three months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that redefined his presidency, George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office for the first of what would become a series of six interviews about how he had chosen to exercise his most consequential power -- that of commander in chief.

At 55, he was a young president, filled with certainty. The war in Afghanistan appeared to be going well. The US military had overthrown the Taliban regime and was hammering al-Qaeda sanctuaries. He kept photos of al-Qaeda leaders in his desk and showed how he had crossed through the pictures with a large "X" as each suspected terrorist was killed or captured. He explained: "One time early on, I said: 'I'm a baseball fan. I want a scorecard.' "

He confidently laid out grand goals. "We're going to root out terror wherever it may exist," he said. He talked of achieving "world peace" and of creating unity at home. "The job of the president," he said, "is to unite the nation."

More at The Washington Post.

Robert Bateman, Army Infantry Officer and author of Digital War: A View from the Front Lines and No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident

Shawn Brimley, a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security

Roger Carstens, retired Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel and Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security

Janine Davidson, former Air Force pilot and Assistant Professor at George Mason University's School of Public Policy

Clint Douglas, former Army Special Forces Sergeant and contributor to Operation Homecoming

Colin Kahl, Assistant Professor in the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University

John Nagl, retired US Army Officer and Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security

Erin Simpson, who writes on Counterinsurgency strategy and terrorism

Enjoy...

Late in the afternoon of June 10, during a firefight with Taliban militants along the Afghan-Pakistani border, American soldiers called in airstrikes to beat back the attack. The firefight was taking place right on the border itself, known in military jargon as the "zero line." Afghanistan was on one side, and the remote Pakistani region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, was on the other. The stretch of border was guarded by three Pakistani military posts.

The American bombers did the job, and then some. By the time the fighting ended, the Taliban militants had slipped away, the American unit was safe and 11 Pakistani border guards lay dead. The airstrikes on the Pakistani positions sparked a diplomatic row between the two allies: Pakistan called the incident "unprovoked and cowardly"; American officials regretted what they called a tragic mistake. But even after a joint inquiry by the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it remained unclear why American soldiers had reached the point of calling in airstrikes on soldiers from Pakistan, a critical ally in the war in Afghanistan and the campaign against terrorism.

The mystery, at least part of it, was solved in July by four residents of Suran Dara, a Pakistani village a few hundred yards from the site of the fight. According to two of these villagers, whom I interviewed together with a local reporter, the Americans started calling in airstrikes on the Pakistanis after the latter started shooting at the Americans.

"When the Americans started bombing the Taliban, the Frontier Corps started shooting at the Americans," we were told by one of Suran Dara's villagers, who, like the others, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being persecuted or killed by the Pakistani government or the Taliban. "They were trying to help the Taliban. And then the American planes bombed the Pakistani post."

Much more at The New York Times.

More Troops Needed in Afghanistan, General Says

By Gerry J. Gilmore

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5, 2008 -- Though U.S., coalition and Afghan troops are making steady progress against increasingly active insurgent forces in Afghanistan, it's time to turn up the heat, a senior U.S. military officer said today.

"I believe that more forces are required. And I think that over the next several months we can put them, certainly, to good use," Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 101 and 101st Airborne Division, told Pentagon reporters during a satellite-carried news conference.

Insurgent attacks in Afghanistan have increased 20 to 30 percent from 2007 to now, said Schloesser, who arrived in Afghanistan in April and also heads counterinsurgency operations for NATO's Regional Command East.

Discussions about increasing the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan are ongoing among senior leaders in Washington, Schloesser acknowledged.

"We're making some steady progress" in Afghanistan, Schloesser pointed out. However, defeating the estimated 7,000 to 11,000 insurgents there "will take longer the way we are doing it right now, as far as the resources that we have," he said.

"I'd like to speed it up," Schloesser said of the anti-insurgent campaign's pace in Afghanistan. He estimated that a troop increase on the order of "a series of thousands" would be of sufficient size.

"I'm going to ask for more troops. I think it's pretty commonly known that I already have," Schloesser said. "And, I'm optimistic that we'll potentially see them in the coming months."

NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan consists of about 45,000 troops, including around 15,000 U.S. troops. Another 19,000 or so U.S. troops are assigned to Combined Joint Task Force 101, commanded by Schloesser.

Arrayed against U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan is a loosely knit collection of terrorists, Schloesser said, who share a radical Islamic ideology and the belief that President Hamid Karzai's democratic government is illegitimate.

"Again, this is not a huge, strong movement; it is not a team," Schloesser said of the polyglot enemy operating in Afghanistan, which includes Taliban extremists, Pakistan-based radicals and al-Qaida-aligned terrorists. "There are ways to break it apart."

To put added pressure on insurgents in Afghanistan, Schloesser is preparing a two-pronged winter campaign.

"This campaign has got two components. One of them is a strong military offensive and the other is a developmental surge," Schloesser said. Recent anti-insurgent operations in Khowst province and elsewhere in Afghanistan, he said, have eliminated some key extremist leaders and uncovered numerous enemy supply and weapons caches.

The winter offensive will root out the enemy "where he hides," the general said.

"We will pursue them wherever they run. We will intercept them, and we're going to destroy their resources," Schloesser said. "My intent is to eliminate the support areas within our sector to diminish the enemy's ability to operate next year."

The development part of the winter campaign will feature projects designed to keep young Afghans occupied during this winter and through the spring and summer, Schloesser said.

"They'll be doing things such as clearing ice and snow from roads, doing construction training workshops, road maintenance, distribution of essentials to villages that are basically isolated, such as clothes and food," the general explained.

The purpose of the development portion of the winter campaign, Schloesser said, is to provide employment for the people most vulnerable to insurgent recruiting pitches. This program, he said, will also provide roads, wells, schools, clinics, micro-hydroelectric plants and more in remote areas of Afghanistan that have lacked modern infrastructure.

This year, nearly $480 million in Commanders Emergency Response Program money has been committed to fund such projects in Afghanistan, Schloesser said, noting that's double the amount committed last year.

"We're trying to match the power we have here, both the hard power ... as far as the [military] operations that we're going to do on the ground with our troops, as well as soft power, and that's the CERP, then, the development funds that I've talked about," Schloesser explained.

Meanwhile, there is "absolutely no way" that the enemy will triumph in Afghanistan, Schloesser declared.

"We're not losing this war, and we won't lose [it even if additional troops] don't show up in the next several months," Schloesser said.

Biographies:

Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser

Related Sites:

Combined Joint Task Force 101

NATO International Security Assistance Force

Escalation is a natural tendency in any form of human competition. When such competition entails military confrontation or war, the pressure to escalate can become intense due to the potential cost of losing conflicts of deadly force. Cold War--era thinking about escalation focused on the dynamics of bipolar, superpower confrontation and strategies to control it. Today's security environment, however, demands that the United States be prepared for a host of escalatory threats involving not only long-standing nuclear powers, but also new, lesser nuclear powers and irregular adversaries, such as insurgent groups and terrorists. This examination of escalation dynamics and approaches to escalation management draws on historical examples from World War I through Somalia in the early 1990s. It reveals that, to manage the risks of escalatory chain reactions in future conflicts, military and political leaders will need to understand and dampen the mechanisms of deliberate, accidental, and inadvertent escalation. Informing the analysis are the results of two modified Delphi exercises, which focused on a potential conflict between China and the United States over Taiwan and a potential conflict between states and nonstate actors in the event of a collapse of Pakistan's government.

More at Rand.

The next U.S. commander in chief will face the most daunting defense inheritance in generations when he takes the oath of office in January. Not since the Johnson-Nixon handoff 40 years ago has the country faced such a challenging wartime transition. Ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will force the new president to make early and consequential decisions regarding the U.S. approach toward both conflicts as well as the search for al Qaeda's top leadership in the lawless frontier lands along the Afghan-Pakistani border. President John McCain or Barack Obama will inherit a military that, although still the best in the world, is experiencing profound strains after nearly seven years of constant warfare. A young person entering the combat branches of the Army or Marine Corps in the months following the September 11 terrorist attacks has almost certainly deployed numerous times to Afghanistan and/or Iraq. An entire generation of young military personnel has endured years of difficult and heroic service and sacrifice. Their morale is high, but they and their families are tired.

The next secretary of defense will inherit a department that also is under enormous pressure. The constant imperative to support forward-deployed forces engaged in current operations has strained the ability of the military services and their civilian leaders to adequately plan for a complex and uncertain future. The high financial costs of two wars, rapidly increasing personnel obligations, and huge cost overruns in most major procurement programs have caused Pentagon spending to skyrocket. With the U.S. economy sliding toward recession and the national deficit and foreign debt rising to unprecedented levels, the next president and secretary of defense will need to avoid strategic overstretch and make difficult decisions about where to place emphasis and how to prudently balance risk.

The next Pentagon team will thus be faced with the dual challenge of presenting the new commander in chief with the best possible advice on key current wartime decisions while providing the support and leadership necessary to prepare U.S. armed forces for a future far different from the one for which they were optimized. This challenging endeavor will require forming a comprehensive and strategic view in order to chart a way forward.

More at The Washington Quarterly.

The process of transferring power from a sitting U.S. president to a president-elect is one of the most distinctive and perilous features of the American constitutional system - a time of great hope and optimism, but also one of great risk. From the earliest days of the Cold War, how the old and new leaders have navigated this strait has literally been a matter of survival for the United States and for the stability and prosperity of the entire world.

The end of the Cold War has changed the nature of the dangers, but in many ways the two-and-a-half-month transition that will take place at the end of this year poses even greater challenges than in the past. These 72 days are fraught with suspense, tension, promise, and risk as a new team of foreign policy players confronts the arduous challenges of managing the interregnum.

The experience of transitions over the past 60 years is full of poignant examples of self-inflicted wounds and near misses, as well as of skillful takings of the reins. Although each transition is unique, the next president and his team need to understand the lessons of the past if he is to take advantage of the great opportunities for new U.S. leadership and avoid the landmines that lie ahead.

More at The Washington Quarterly.

The latest on the CCO. This edition of the newsletter includes information on a number of initiatives, including a workshop co-sponsored with the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) on education and training, a task force to recommend options for a lessons learned process, an interview with Dr. Steven Metz on his latest scholarship on high value targeting in counterinsurgency, upcoming events in the complex operations community and more.

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to colleagues who may not have heard of the CCO and who might be interested in their activities.