The Insurgents Read online

  Additional praise for

  THE INSURGENTS

  “Thrilling reading. . . . There is no one better equipped to tell the story . . . than Fred Kaplan, a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter. . . . He brings genuine expertise to his fine storytelling. . . . An authoritative, gripping and somewhat terrifying account of how the American military approached two major wars in the combustible Islamic world.”

  —Thanassis Cambaniss, The New York Times Book Review

  “Serious and insightful. . . . The Insurgents seems destined to be one of the more significant looks at how the US pursued the war in Iraq and at the complex mind of the general in charge when the tide turned.”

  —Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times

  “Riveting . . . essential reading. . . . Kaplan’s meticulous account of the ways Petraeus found to bring together and nurture the counterinsurgency ‘cabal’ might profitably be read by anyone interested in bringing change to a giant bureaucracy.”

  —John Barry, The Daily Beast

  “Excellent . . . Poignant and timely. . . . A good read, rich in texture and never less than wise.”

  —Rosa Brooks, Foreign Policy

  “Kaplan has a gift for bringing to life what might otherwise seem like arcane strategic debates by linking them to the personalities and biographies of the main participates, and he vividly captures the drama of Petraeus’ struggle against a Pentagon establishment.”

  —Lawrence Freedman, Foreign Affairs

  “Compelling”

  —Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker

  “A very readable, thoroughly reported account of how, in American military circles, ‘counterinsurgency’ became a policy instead of a dirty word.”

  —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

  “The book’s strength lies in the rich detail Kaplan offers the reader as he traces the network of colleagues all dedicated to stopping the violence in Iraq by employing classic counterinsurgency techniques. He untangles the web of professional connections much the same way an intelligence analyst might track down the associates of an al-Qaeda cell. . . . What emerges is a meticulously researched picture.”

  —Laura Colarusso, The Washington Monthly

  “A tremendously clear and informative guide to the strengths and weaknesses of the military we have today and to the decisions we are about to make. . . . Anyone who reads The Insurgents will be better prepared to understand what America has done right and wrong with its military over the past generation.”

  —James Fallows, The American Prospect

  “A dramatic and also damning analysis. . . . An absorbing and informative account.”

  —William W. Finan, Jr., Current History

  “A must-read for military and national security professionals . . . Prodigious detail . . . earthy information about the human foibles of the participants.”

  —Gary Anderson, Washington Times

  “Fascinating . . . One of the most interesting books I’ve read in the past seven years about the US in Iraq and counterinsurgency. . . . It is also one of the rare books that links personal histories, political maneuvers inside the national-security apparatus, and strategy on the ground.”

  —Stéphane Taillat, Alliance Géostratégique

  “A fascinating . . . fast-moving, insider account . . . of how the ‘insurgents’—savvy officers with big brains and advanced degrees in history and the social sciences—came to develop a new counterinsurgency doctrine, push the careers of their friends, form alliances across the government, influence the development of the surge in Iraq and generally succeed against the wishes of many in Congress, the Joint Chiefs and the previous theater commanders.”

  —Joseph J. Collins, Armed Forces Journal

  “A compelling story combined with thoughtful analysis of the development, application and limitations of a new model of applying American military power.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “An illuminating and frequently infuriating examination of how the US views warfare. Measured and meticulous, Kaplan’s account is informative, detail-laden, and tempered by sharp analysis.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fred Kaplan has written a dazzling, compulsively readable book. Let’s start with the fact that it is so well written, a quality so often lacking in books describing counterinsurgency. Let’s also throw in the facts that it is both deeply researched and also devoid of cheerleading for the military or indeed any other kind of political bias. This book will join a small shelf of the most important accounts of the wars America has fought and will likely continue to fight in the twenty-first century.”

  —Peter Bergen, author of Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad

  “Fred Kaplan, one of the best military journalists we have, tells the compelling story of how a cadre of officers and civilians tried to rescue victory from defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan by putting the theory of counterinsurgency into practice, revolutionizing the US Army from within. His narrative is vivid and revelatory, dramatizing a crucial piece of recent history that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to forget, however painful the memory.”

  —George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq

  “Fred Kaplan is one of the best in the business, a top-notch journalist and military analyst with serious intellectual chops and a killer pen. His new book, The Insurgents, tells the story of the rise and fall of the COINdinistas from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond, and it’s not only a great read—it’s a major contribution to one of the most important strategic debates of our time.”

  —Gideon Rose, editor, Foreign Affairs, and author of How Wars End

  “A fascinating and powerful work by America’s wisest national-security reporter about an epic battle: the Army’s search for a way to win the wars of the twenty-first century. If you love your country, if you care about its soldiers, if you wonder about the wisdom of their commanders, read this book now.”

  —Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA and Enemies: A History of the FBI

  Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.

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  DAVID PETRAEUS

  AND THE PLOT TO CHANGE

  THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR

  Contents

  1. “What We Need Is an Officer with Three Heads”

  2. “Another Type of Warfare”

  3. “Eating Soup with a Knife”

  4. Revolutions

  5. The Insurgent at War

  6. The Irregulars

  7. “Where’s My Counterinsurgency Plan?”

  8. The Basin Harbor Gang

  9. The Directive

  10. The Insurgent in the Engine Room of Change

  11. The Workshop at Tatooine

  12. Hearts & Minds

  13. “Clear, Hold, and Build”

  14. “We Are Pulling in Different Directions”

  15. The Field Manual

  16. The Surge

  17. Awakenings

  18. The Insurgent in the Pentagon

  19. “It Is Folly”

  20. COIN Versus CT

  21. “Storm Clouds”

  22. “A New American Way of War”

  Postscript

  Interviews

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Fred Kaplan

  Notes

  Index

  Again, and always—for Brooke, Maxine, and Sophie

  1.

  “Wh
at We Need Is an Officer with Three Heads”

  A few days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, John Nagl saw his future disappear.

  The first tremors came at dawn, on February 24, 1991, as he revved up the engine of his M-1 tank and plowed across the Saudi Arabian border into the flat, endless sands of southern Iraq. For the previous month, American warplanes had bombarded Saddam Hussein’s military machine to the point of exhaustion. Now the ground-war phase of Operation Desert Storm—the largest armored offensive since the Second World War—roared forth in full force, pushing Iraq’s occupying army out of Kuwait.

  Lieutenant Nagl was a platoon leader in the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, which, on that morning, mounted the crucial feint along the route where Saddam’s commanders were expecting an invasion. While Nagl and the rest of the 1st Cav pinned down the Iraqi troops with a barrage of bullets, shells, and missiles, the offensive’s main force—a massive armada of American soldiers, nearly a quarter million strong, along with their armored vehicles, artillery rockets, and a fleet of gunship helicopters overhead—swept across the desert landscape from the west in a surprise left-hook assault, enveloping Saddam’s troops and crushing them into submission after a mere one hundred hours of astonishingly lopsided fighting.

  Nagl had graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point two-and-a-half years earlier, near the top of his class, and then won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. Highly ranked cadets got their pick of Army assignments, and Nagl chose the armor branch. Tanks would be the spearhead of the big war for which the Army was ceaselessly preparing—the titanic clash between the United States and the Soviet Union across the East-West German border—and so, tank commanders were prime candidates for fast promotion through the ranks. Nagl even studied German while at West Point and became fluent in the language, figuring that Germany was where he’d be spending the bulk of his career.

  Then, not quite a year before he deployed to the Gulf, the Berlin Wall fell, the two Germanys merged, the Cold War ended—and now, right before his eyes, the Iraqi army, the fourth-largest army in the world, was crumbling on contact.

  It was a moment of unaccustomed triumph for the US military, still haunted by the defeat in Vietnam. But to Nagl, it also signaled the end of the era that made the triumph possible. Tank-on-tank combat had been the defining mode of warfare for a modern superpower; now it teetered on the verge of obsolescence. The Soviet Union and Iraq had been the last two foes that possessed giant tank armies. With the former gone up in smoke and the latter crushed so easily on the battlefield, it seemed implausible that any foreign power would again dare challenge the United States in a head-on contest of strength. The premise of all Nagl’s plans—to say nothing of the rationale for his beloved Army’s doctrines, budgets, and weapons programs—seemed suddenly, alarmingly irrelevant.

  Nagl didn’t think that any of this necessarily meant the coming of world peace. If “major combat operations” (the official name for big tank wars) were no longer likely, there was still plenty of room for minor ones, especially the “shadow wars” mounted along the peripheries of vital interests by insurgents, guerrillas, or terrorists. Nagl didn’t know much about these kinds of wars. Neither did the Army. He hadn’t learned about them as a cadet at West Point. Nor had he since read about them in Army field manuals or practiced fighting them in officers’ training drills.

  There was a reason for this gap in his education. In the mid-1970s, after the debacle of Vietnam, the Army’s top generals said “Never again” to the notion of fighting guerrillas in the jungle (or anyplace else). Instead, they turned their gaze once more to the prospect of a big war against the Soviet Union on the wide-open plains of Europe—a war that would play to America’s traditional strengths of amassing men and metal—and they threw out the book (literally: they threw out the official manuals and curricula) on anything related to what were once called “irregular wars,” “asymmetric wars,” “low-intensity conflicts,” or “counterinsurgency campaigns.” To the extent that these types of wars were contemplated at all, the message went out that there was nothing distinctive about them. For decades, Army doctrine had held that wars were won by superior firepower. This idea was taken as gospel, whether the war was large or small, whether the enemy was a nation-state or a rogue guerrilla. As one adage put it, if you can lick the cat, you can lick the kitten. Or, in the words of another: war is war is war.

  But Nagl suspected that, like it or not, America might find itself drawn into fighting these “small wars” again; that if the Army had a future, these wars would play a key part in it; and (though he didn’t grasp this idea at first) that these wars were different from large wars in ways other than mere size and, therefore, had to be fought in different ways by soldiers trained in different skills.

  Not long after Desert Storm, Nagl persuaded the Army to send him back to Oxford for graduate school, where he embarked on a historical study of these kinds of wars. The study evolved into a doctoral dissertation, which he published as a book, which he then hoisted as a weapon—an intellectual weapon—in a policy war back home. He sought and found a cadre of allies to fight this war with him: mainly fellow Army officers, along with a few marines and civilian defense analysts, who were reaching similar conclusions through their own experiences, and who, once they grew aware of one another’s existence, formed a community—a “cabal” or “mafia,” some frankly called it—dedicated to the cause of reviving counter-insurgency doctrine and making it a major strand, even the centerpiece, of American military strategy.

  To pull off this feat, they had to act like insurgents: subversive rebels within their own military establishment, armed not with weapons but with ideas and, in some cases, a mastery of bureaucratic maneuvering.

  Most of them fully grasped the irony, and the stakes, of what they were doing. One of these rebels would title a PowerPoint briefing about this community’s emergence, and his role in it, “An Insurgent Within the COIN Revolution.”

  Critics derided them as “COINdinistas,” a wordplay that combined the abbreviation for counterinsurgency (COIN) with the name of the leftist insurgency that seized power in Nicaragua in the late 1970s (Sandinistas). The COIN rebels took to the name, invoking it with a self-aware smirk and a missionary pride. For it was a serious struggle they were waging: a campaign to overhaul the institutional culture of the US military establishment—the way it groomed new leaders, adapted to new settings, and adopted new ideas.

  A few years into the twenty-first century, a second American war in Iraq—this time an outright invasion for the purpose of “regime change”—triggered the rise of sectarian militias. Simultaneously, Islamist insurgents renewed a fight for power in Afghanistan. And the battle of ideas between the COINdinistas and the traditionalists took on an urgent intensity. The stakes were suddenly very high. It was no longer an esoteric quarrel over history and theory, but a struggle whose outcome meant life or death, victory or defeat—not only in those two wars but possibly in other theaters of conflict for years or decades to come. It was a battle for how the Pentagon does business and how America goes to war.

  At first the rebels would win the battle. A cultural upheaval would seize the military at its core. A new kind of officer would rise through the ranks. And the Army would shift from a static garrison establishment to a flexible fighting force, more adaptable to the dangers and conflicts of the post–Cold War era.

  Yet, as often happens with revolutions, the new doctrine, enshrined in the first flush of victory, would harden into dogma. And its enthusiasts, emboldened in their confidence, would—often with good intentions—lure the nation more deeply into another war that it lacked the ability or appetite to win.

  • • •

  The seeds of the COIN revolt first sprouted in the Army’s own hothouse: the military academy at West Point, the gleaming granite fortress overlooking the Hudson River, fifty miles north of New York City, where cadets had been molded into officers since the early years of the repu
blic. A reverence for tradition was carved into its foundations, piped into its air. West Point was where, in 1778, General George Washington built the Continental Army’s most critical strategic fortress. It had remained an Army holding ever since—the oldest continuously occupied military post in North America. President Thomas Jefferson signed the bill establishing the United States Military Academy on West Point’s land in 1802. Fifteen years later, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, one of the academy’s early superintendents, issued its first curriculum and honor code, which survived so many otherwise tumultuous eras that one cadet, in the mid-twentieth century, scribbled out a proposed new motto: “Two Hundred Years of Tradition, Unhindered by Progress.”

  Some on the faculty read it as a benediction, not a joke.

  The COIN rebellion was fomented by a subculture within the academy, composed of officers who venerated tradition but also embraced strands of progress. They saw themselves as apart from (some would say above) the rest of West Point. They were the faculty and students of its Social Sciences Department, known to members and detractors alike as “Sosh.”

  Sosh was the brainchild of George Arthur Lincoln, who graduated from West Point in 1929, ranking fourth in his class. There were no majors or even electives at the academy in those days; everyone took the same courses, most of them in engineering. (Throughout the nineteenth century, West Point alumni had played a leading role in constructing the nation’s rail lines, bridges, harbors, and interstate roads.) Lincoln, nicknamed Abe by his friends, won a Rhodes Scholarship after graduating and spent the next three years at Oxford, studying philosophy, politics, and economics. It was a heady experience for the son of a farmer from Harbor Beach, Michigan, a small town on the shore of Lake Huron. Afterward, he came back to West Point to teach.

  When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Lincoln was assigned to a high-level staff job in London, where he planned the logistics for the Normandy invasion. His talents were quickly recognized, and in the spring of 1943, he was ordered back to Washington to serve as deputy chief of the Strategy and Policy Group, the US Army’s brain trust, located on the third floor of the Pentagon, next to the office of the chief of staff, General George Marshall. In the fall of 1944, at age thirty-seven, Lincoln was promoted to brigadier general—making him the Army’s youngest general officer—and took over as the S&P Group’s chief. He coordinated operations for every major military campaign in the war’s final year and advised Marshall on a daily basis, accompanying him to the conferences at Yalta and Potsdam, where he had a hand in drafting the treaties that shaped the political map of postwar Europe.