My father served in World War II and my older brother served during the Vietnam War, so I always felt that joining the armed forces at some point in my life was a natural and reasonable thing to do. My father had not been in a direct combat role—he was a supply specialist with the US Army Air Forces, helping fly supplies “over the hump” from northern India to the AAF’s forward bases in China. Still, I grew up with stories my parents told about his deployment to India and my mother’s wait for his return. These stories did not glorify war or whitewash the moral ambiguities of the American war effort. Even so, they instilled in me the conviction that wars could be fought and won for righteous causes.
My parents were politically toward the left and very critical of the US war effort in Vietnam. Their opposition was not to war per se, though, but rather to Washington’s rationale for entering that particular war in the first place. They drew a distinction between wars and those sent to fight them. A war could be fought for the wrong reasons, but that didn’t make the soldiers fighting it equally wrong. Not everyone would make that distinction, especially not the strident critics of US involvement in Vietnam. But my parents did see a difference there, and their thinking stuck with me.
Drawn to the idea of military service, I signed a contract with Army ROTC at UC Berkeley. In 1986, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history and a commission as an armor officer.
Two decades later, I found myself and the armored reconnaissance squadron that I commanded caught in a vicious, deadly, and complex civil war in Iraq. By the time I returned to the United States with my squadron at the end of 2006, the Army was beginning to embrace counterinsurgency doctrine as a formula for victory in the country. The subsequent propagation of overly simplistic solutions to lowering violence in Iraq, along with the hagiographical celebration of certain Army generals, is what set me on the path to military dissent.
I DON’T BELIEVE I ever had a firm expectation of what war would be like. In the months leading up to our invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was so busy and so worried about doing my job correctly that I had little time to think about the character of the war in which I was about to participate. As the executive officer of a brigade combat team, I had the primary responsibility for moving a very large unit—four thousand soldiers and fifteen hundred vehicles—from Fort Hood, Texas, to Tikrit, Iraq. The complexity of that operation, at a time when the Army had few recent experiences moving those kinds of forces halfway around the world, practically consumed me.
Only during my second deployment, in 2006—this time as a squadron commander—did I find time to reflect on what I expected the war I was in to be. Early on in that deployment, I remember feeling frustrated that I had not experienced direct fire combat. By the time my cavalry squadron began operations in west Baghdad the level of attacks against US forces had dropped precipitously. I remember being bothered by the notion that I might go through an entire year and not take part in actions against the enemy. Looking back, I am embarrassed to say that I wished I would get hit by a deep-buried IED or something similar so I could earn the Army’s Combat Action Badge.
My cavalry squadron was part of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division. We were initially assigned a very large area in southwest Baghdad called West Rasheed. In late December 2005, we spent about ten days doing “relief in place” of an infantry battalion that had been responsible for that area for most of the year—having them introduce us to the territory, places of importance, key individuals, and troublesome areas that still contained a modicum of enemy activity. In January, we took over responsibility for the area and began operations.
The mission of the 4th Infantry Division at the start of 2006 was to finish up the training of Iraqi police forces, which at that point were dominated by Iraqi Shiite militias aided by Iran. I remember how a few months before we deployed, our division commander at the time, Major General J. D. Thurman, said that 2006 was going to be “the year of the Iraqi police.” He meant that in a positive way: like the rest of us, he believed that by the start of 2006 Iraq was well on its way toward democracy. The Iraqis had already held some of their first democratic elections, and it seemed that creating a competent police force would essentially complete the US mission dating from the 2003 invasion.
Indeed, from my narrower tactical perspective, the first two months of 2006 appeared to confirm that Iraq was well on its way toward stability. My cavalry squadron, which at that point consisted of around a thousand soldiers, experienced no kinetic strikes, whether by IEDs or small arms. In fact, the overall coalition commander in Iraq at the time, General George Casey, had developed what was called an “off-ramp plan.” That meant that since levels of violence were so low, and the basic institutions of democracy were apparently taking root, the United States could start reducing its overall level of commitment. As part of this plan, the 4th Infantry Division was scheduled to redeploy back to the United States nearly three months early. Such was the rosy, hyper-optimistic view of things that the US military and political leaders held in early 2006.
Then, on February 22, 2006, al-Qaeda militants—Sunni Islamist extremists—struck the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, a highly revered Shiite holy site. A huge explosive device detonated inside the mosque, toppling its beautiful golden dome into an ugly mess of rubble.
That single spectacular act of destruction by al-Qaeda plunged my squadron into the middle of a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. Yet that civil war did not suddenly begin on February 22. What I later realized was that it was really driven by America’s decision, after our removal of the Saddam Hussein regime, to rebuild Iraqi institutions and society along the lines of American representative democracy.
Under Saddam, Sunnis had enjoyed a privileged place in Iraqi society and politics. Instating representative democracy in a country where Shiite Iraqis accounted for about 70 percent of the overall population and Sunnis only 20 percent meant that Sunnis would inevitably lose that privileged status. It was this prospect that put Iraq on the path to civil war. The Askari bombing only brought things out into the open.
I remember in the first couple of weeks after the Askari bombing getting numerous calls on my cell phone from sheikhs at Sunni mosques, begging me to send forces to defend them from reprisal attacks by the Iraqi police and Shiite militias. At first these calls puzzled me. I remember thinking there was some mistake. How could it be that Iraqi police were attacking mosques in Baghdad? This was “the year of the police”; with our help, they were supposed to be developing into an institutional pillar of Iraqi democracy. But witnessing the attacks firsthand, and through the lenses of drones flying high above, made it evident to me very quickly that the real situation was quite different.
A clear indicator of what the civil war entailed was the growing number of dead bodies we would find each day strewn along the streets of west Baghdad. It was hard to discern the specific motives behind individual deaths, as Iraqi civilians were usually unwilling to talk to us. But we got enough to understand that the killings were part of a process of sectarian cleansing. Dead bodies in a largely Shiite district, for example, meant the purging of the few remaining Sunnis who, for whatever reasons, had refused to leave the vicinity.
Iraqi government institutions such as the Shiite-dominated Ministry of the Interior were themselves complicit in the civil war. In the second half of 2006, my squadron was shifted to northwest Baghdad, where we concentrated most of our effort on the restive, al-Qaeda-dominated district of Amiriyah. We quickly learned from residents of their frustration that the local bank branch in Amiriyah had been closed by the Ministry of the Interior and the similarly Shiite-dominated Ministry of the Treasury. The motive was clear: force Sunnis who needed to draw cash from the bank to leave the safety of their predominantly Sunni district and go to bank branches in Shiite districts instead. Doing this would force them to cross Iraqi police checkpoints, where they could be captured for ransom or killed on the spot.
In the middle of this civil war, attacks against the soldiers in my squadron grew steadily. We suffered more than 350 IED strikes, along with car bombs, suicide bombers, small arms attacks, and occasional snipers. The worst IEDs were the Shiite-made explosively formed projectiles, which were lethal even against our armored vehicles. Over the course of 2006, the squadron lost five soldiers killed in action, while another fifteen suffered life-changing injuries.
Some of the scenes that I came across during that year have stuck with me, and even now I see them like they only happened yesterday. Scenes like the woman weeping in the Amiriyah district that October, holding her dead baby in her arms while her husband lay dead on the street nearby. Her baby had been shot in the head by the same Sunni fighters who killed her husband—all because he, who was Sunni, had returned to Amiriyah with a Shiite wife.
But beyond the images of death and destruction, what most sticks with me from that year is the complexity of the problem my squadron faced: how to stop the warring factions in a civil war from killing each other, while staying alive when those same warring factions were trying to kill us too. It was a difficult situation that could not be resolved by simplistic solutions. In fact, the application of US military forces offered little by way of help, given that those very forces had played a considerable role in creating the problem in the first place.
What my year in west Baghdad showed me, combined with my previous tour in Iraq during the invasion in 2003, is that it is much easier to break a country and its institutions than it is to put everything back together. Rebuilding a country after it has been broken by military force requires a massive amount of resources, time, energy, and commitment. Replacing what you’ve broken takes more than some fancy new doctrinal approaches credited to savior generals.
Two factors put Iraq on the path to civil war. The first was the decision by US policymakers to invade Iraq and remove the Saddam Hussein regime. The second, equally significant, was the decision to rebuild Iraq political institutions by installing a representative democracy in Iraq, regardless of demographic, ethnic, and sectarian realities. Those two critical choices are what created the conditions that erupted in the violent civil war in Baghdad in 2006.
THE LESSONS THAT the US Army took from events in Iraq differed from my own. And in my view, its conclusions were wrong.
In the fall of 2006, after much debate on the home front about what to do with the apparently failing military effort in Iraq, President George W. Bush decided to commit an additional twenty thousand troops in hopes of reducing the high levels of violence stemming from the civil war. Bush’s new senior commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, arrived in Baghdad along with these reinforcements in early 2007. Petraeus also brought with him, as news reports put it, an “enlightened” new approach to counterinsurgency, centered on protecting Iraqi civilians and winning hearts and minds. This kinder and gentler way of warfighting was described in the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3–24, which Petraeus himself had helped to write. Published some months before, it now received glowing attention and acclaim.
Very quickly the American press, along with many military pundits and a few retired US Army four-star generals, began trumpeting Petraeus’s success in turning the war around. By the end of 2007, journalists and policymakers alike settled on a narrative that went like this: The reason the US Army had been failing in Iraq in 2006 was because it didn’t understand and apply proper counterinsurgency doctrine. But then a savior general, armed with FM 3–24, arrived on the scene and immediately began doing counterinsurgency correctly. He instilled innovative tactical and operational methods in his forces, and the result was a precipitous decrease in internecine violence. The forward-thinking generalship of David Petraeus—a warrior-scholar, his followers often noted, with a PhD in political science from Princeton University—had made all the difference.
Based on my own experience in Baghdad in 2006, before Petraeus arrived on the scene, all of this struck me as seriously mistaken and dangerously misguided. Exposing the error became for me a mission of sorts. I attacked the false narrative of the savior-general in two ways. First, I published scores and scores of articles in local and national newspapers and numerous professional journals. Second, I undertook a sustained public-speaking effort, making my case to various civilian, academic, and military audiences.
In the summer of 2007, I arrived at West Point to take up an assignment teaching history. Shortly thereafter, I wrote one of my first published pieces on the topic, offering a critical view of the celebrated FM 3–24 counterinsurgency manual. At its core, I argued, the manual was based on an overly simplistic and generalized view of populations caught up in an insurgency.
A figure in the manual’s opening chapter depicts “support for an insurgency” in the form of a rectangle. A line near the top of the rectangle shows about 10 percent of the population consisting of hard-core insurgents, who can’t be flipped and will have to be either killed or captured. At the bottom of the rectangle is a similar line showing another 10 percent of the population as people who support the counterinsurgent’s cause. The remaining 80 percent represents the rest of the population, the fence-sitters. The authors of FM 3–24 insist that this tripartite 10–80–10 division would always apply: “In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral or passive majority, [and] an active minority against the cause.”
The problem I had was that this depiction did not reflect in any way whatsoever the population that I had encountered in west Baghdad in 2006. That population wasn’t made up of about 80 percent fence-sitters who were waiting to be won over to either the insurgent or counterinsurgent side. Instead, the population in Baghdad was divided smack-dab down the middle, with one side being Shiite and the other side being Sunni. As an approved Army doctrine, FM 3–24 was supposed to be authoritative. Yet its description of a population’s support for insurgency, and the assertion that all populations will look like the one described, suggested to me that the new doctrine was based on false assumptions.
The manual also contained a deeply flawed cause-and-effect schema. It posited that if a counterinsurgent force provides the local population with benefits such as security, work, access to medical care, schools for the children, and so on, then the population will side with the counterinsurgents and turn against the insurgent fighters. But as I argued in an essay that appeared in Armed Forces Journal, my own unit had pretty much done those things in west Baghdad in 2006 without notable success. So why, I asked, had they not worked?
The answer from Petraeus’s advocates, of course, was that prior to the surge in 2007, few in the US Army actually understood how to do counterinsurgency correctly. It wasn’t until the surge and the arrival of Petraeus that the Army finally started to “get it” and thus turned things around.
Such dismissive responses to my critique of FM 3–24 prompted me to undertake further research and analysis. I wanted to compare the fundamental tactical and operational approaches used during the surge with what had come before. I wanted to assess the continuities and discontinuities between the generalship of Petraeus and his predecessor, General George Casey. What my research showed was that there was no fundamental shift in how units on the ground had operated. True, during the surge there were a few more “combat outposts” manned by US Army soldiers sprinkled in a few Baghdad districts. But they were too few in number to make the kind of difference that the surge narrative was postulating. And even though Petraeus was a more charismatic, press-savvy general, Casey’s and Petraeus’s overall approaches to command in Iraq were more similar than not.
At the same time that I was publishing numerous articles critical of FM 3–24, I was also calling into question the “surge triumph” narrative that had so firmly taken hold as an explanation for why violence in Iraq declined during 2007. That narrative attributed the lowered levels of violence to additional troops applying FM 3–24 under the stellar generalship of David Petraeus. The assertion seemed highly problematic to me.
The counterargument I made was that the reduction in violence had less to do with the surge and more to do with the Sunni Awakening that spread from Iraq’s western provinces in 2006 and into Baghdad in 2007. Fed up with al-Qaeda’s strict moral codes and violent actions against Sunni civilians who didn’t conform to their ways, many Sunni insurgents professed a willingness to make common cause with the American military in fighting al-Qaeda. This Sunni Awakening happened at the same time that a large number of Shiite militias in Iraq decided to stand down their attacks against Sunni civilians. These two factors, not the surge of US troops practicing enlightened counterinsurgency doctrine, were the primary reason for the decline of violence in Iraq.
By 2010, I had been at West Point teaching history for nearly four years since my return from Baghdad. During those four years, in addition to taking on FM 3–24 and the surge triumph narrative, I also evolved a sustained critique of the US approach to Iraq and Afghanistan in general. FM 3–24, I pointed out, was not just a doctrinal manual on how to fight an insurgency, but essentially a prescription for armed nation-building. That was exactly what the United States had been doing in Afghanistan and Iraq for many years. I argued that armed nation-building made no sense unless undertaken in concert with a workable overarching strategy. Any such strategy would have to acknowledge that using foreign military forces to rebuild (or build from scratch) the major institutions of a country would entail a generational effort consuming huge amounts of American blood and treasure. To consider that prospect was to confront a fundamental question: Why undertake such an effort in the first place except in situations where genuinely vital interests were at stake? On that score, neither Iraq nor Afghanistan justified any kind of maximalist effort.
This is where the defects of FM 3–24 and the fallacies of the surge triumph narrative combined: together they suggested that nation-building at the barrel of a gun was a reasonable task to undertake. Indeed, John Nagl, one of the original prophets of US counterinsurgency and one of the authors of FM 3–24 itself, wrote in 2008 that “winning the Global War on Terror [will] require an ability not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies.”
“Change entire societies”—there it was, encapsulated in a few words by one of the leading proponents of American counterinsurgency. The Army’s ostensible success in Iraq provided a template for what future savior-generals would do again and again in other countries. In essence, it was this fundamentally wrongheaded and deeply flawed belief in the unlimited capacity of US military power that pushed me toward full-out military dissent. I felt compelled to challenge the notion that a US Army that had made everything work out in Iraq could go on to do the same in other troubled spots around the world.
What I did in my seven years of professional military dissent from 2007 to 2013 was argue the opposite. I believed, and still believe, that there are huge limits to what military power can accomplish. I believe further that war must be seen not as the best option for fixing the world’s problems but as the last resort.
My dissent, therefore, was not antiwar or anti-Army. I am not a pacifist. Nor am I an isolationist, as many critics have accused me of being. I do believe that the United States needs a strong military to protect the nation and, when needed, to secure its important interests abroad. My dissent, therefore, was aimed specifically at fixing a delusion that I believe my Army had fallen into as a consequence of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was never a dissent directed at the Army writ large or its role in the national defense.
From what I can tell, those seven years of professional military dissent had no impact on the actual US strategy and the conduct of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor did my critique end the Army’s infatuation with counterinsurgency. Still, I think my efforts mattered. I believe I educated leaders within the Army and the Department of Defense. If nothing else, by pushing back against the Army’s embrace of counterinsurgency and challenging the triumphal surge narrative, I provided the Army with a much-needed alternative in thinking about our recent wars.
I like to imagine that the generation of US Army officers who as young lieutenants read and absorbed my arguments came to appreciate that sometimes it’s necessary to confront conventional wisdom. If my efforts helped convey the importance of thinking critically, whatever the current institutional version of truth, then all the work that I put into my dissent was worth it.
One thing I know for sure: given a chance to do it all over again, I would.