Iraq's hard truths shape general's new battle plan

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. -- When Lieutenant General David Petraeus was reassigned last year from a top command in Iraq to this sprawling Army complex in the heartland where new leaders are trained, many in the military saw it as a move to sideline a potential critic from Pentagon decision-making.

Petraeus seized on the opportunity to think -- about how the war has been waged and how it should have been.

As commander of the 101st Airborne Division, and later as the commander in charge of training Iraqi forces, Petraeus had gained "ground truth," as it is called in the military, about taking on the deadly and confounding insurgency that emerged after the swift, early victory in the campaign against Baghdad.

And he had gained a painful sense of how underprepared the US forces had been to take on this unconventional foe, and how high the price had been, in blood and money, of having to devise tactics on the fly.

The three-star general, under a mandate from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, set out to distill those lessons and others that could have been learned -- but weren't -- in Vietnam, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere into a new Army field manual for counterinsurgency warfare, or COIN, the first such doctrine for soldiers in the field in 20 years.

"There was a sense in Iraq that policy makers and a lot of people who conduct operations on the ground were not well versed enough in the principles of counterinsurgency. These were lessons which had been neglected since the Vietnam War," Petraeus said in an interview with the Globe.

"We needed to change that," he added.

The 240-page document, a near-final draft of which was made available to the Globe, is set to be released this week, and 8,500 bound volumes are expected to be sent from the Pentagon to military leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere who have been clamoring for a new set of operational tools.

The draft suggests, even through its subject headings, just how radically Petraeus believes the military needs to reexamine the way it fights a war without conventional battlefields or an obvious end. Consider these headings in a section of Chapter One titled "Paradoxes":

"The More You Protect Your Force, the Less Secure You Are."

"The Best Weapons for COIN Do Not Shoot."

"Sometimes Doing Nothing Is the Best Reaction."

"Most Important Decisions Are Not Made by Generals."

Counterinsurgency warfare is, as the Petraeus draft describes it, "war at the graduate level," where every unit commander must be a kind of "strategic lieutenant" calibrating the right balance between soldiers' killing power and the exercise of restraint that can turn potential enemies into allies.

"The mix is the key," Petraeus said. "A constant balancing of offense and defense."

The new doctrine is part of a sweeping rethink of Iraq strategy underway for some time and accelerated since Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation. General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has pulled together 12 top military officers to reexamine and, where necessary, change strategy.

But Petraeus's suggestions may also come too late, some critics contend, for a war that has already ground on for nearly four years.

"It's admirable and overdue," said Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate and Vietnam War veteran who is now director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. "But it's too late to have an effect in Iraq."

Petraeus doesn't accept that. Earlier this month, he sat at his desk at Fort Leavenworth still penciling in final changes to the document that he drafted with his coauthor, Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis, and other officers and advisers.

As Petraeus scribbled notes on the margins of the document, he explained that some of the hard edge of that draft wording had been buffed away. "Sometimes" the best weapons do not shoot. "Many," not most, decisions aren't made by generals.

But the heart of the doctrine remains: Success in fighting insurgents requires an artful balancing of raw military might with ground-level smarts -- it does no good to take the territory but lose the support of the people who live there.

"This doctrine is to provide guidance for leaders on the ground so that they recognize how to adjust . . . depending on the situation in their areas," Petraeus said in an interview last week in his office at Fort Leavenworth's Combined Arms Center on the banks of the Missouri River. The center has, since 1882, been responsible for training military leaders for war and has in recent years become known as a kind of military think tank.

Petraeus said the doctrine was intended to underscore the vital need for battlefield commanders to pursue, in their tactics, not only victory, but also "moral legitimacy." It traces the history of insurgency from the Apache Indians to the Viet Cong and the often frustrated attempts to counter them.

But as Petraeus is quick to note, it is in no way a "shying away from the need to kill the enemy."

" Kill and capture is on every page," he said.

The doctrine is an attempt to jump-start what Petraeus calls "the engine of change" that he contends is needed in the military in the post-Sept. 11 world.

He has traveled the country offering opinion leaders, in government and academia, a PowerPoint presentation titled "Engines for Change." He clicks through the slides like a young entrepreneur eager to take a big idea to market.

Widely regarded as one of the military's leading intellectuals, Petraeus, 53, graduated near the top of his class at West Point in 1974 and was too late for Vietnam. He received a doctorate from Princeton in 1987 and wrote his dissertation on the lessons the Army should have drawn from the Vietnam War.

In the past year, he has brought that sense of history to the inner workings of the military. Petraeus wasn't one of the generals who spoke out publicly against the war, choosing instead to use his posting to Fort Leavenworth as an opportunity to work from the inside to lay the groundwork for change. And a return to center stage could come soon. Three senior military officers from Central Command and Washington say Petraeus is considered a likely choice for one of the three top jobs in the military: commander of CENTCOM, commanding general in Iraq, or Army chief of staff.

But even some who admire the effort to change the Army say the new doctrine will do little to help matters in Iraq.

"They are a day late and a dollar short," said Barry Posen, director of the security studies program at MIT.

The draft doctrine states, "Without good intelligence, a counterinsurgent is like a blind boxer." But Posen said the doctrine, which he viewed in its early draft, does not provide guidance for collecting and analyzing intelligence. Nor does it assess the failures of intelligence, and of counterinsurgent strategy, in planning for the war.

Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, former director of operations at the Pentagon and the first retired general to come forward last year to call for Rumsfeld's resignation, agreed with that assessment.

"It is useful that the military is adapting to face realities in this particular insurgency, and this effort to create new doctrine should be applauded. But, absent a strategic direction from the government, I do not see what difference it will make," Newbold said in a telephone interview.

However, a senior military officer who worked on the document but spoke on the condition of anonymity defended the Petraeus approach: "It's true the government hasn't come up with a successful strategy. So if they're not doing it, we'll work it from the bottom up."

The need for the rethinking of counterinsurgency strategy seems obvious to many at the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth that Petraeus now commands. There, Army captains and recently appointed majors -- nicknamed the "Jedi Knights" -- train in the finer points of battlefield doctrine. And in some classes here the new COIN doctrine is already being taught.

One of them, Major Sean Davis, 35, of Maryland, who served with the 101st Airborne Division under Petraeus, said: "The doctrine is crucial and much needed. Guys in the field are clamoring for it. It recognizes that counterinsurgency is now the norm. This is a new mind-set -- the Army is really changing."

Petraeus stresses that the manual is not aimed specifically at this war, but at future conflicts. Still, asked whether he believed the military could adapt swiftly enough to make a difference in the current conflict, he said it must.

"We have no choice," he said. "We have to because we have to win."

Charles Sennott can be reached at sen nott@globe.com.