In 2007, I was moved to write an article in the Armed Forces Journal titled “A Failure in Generalship.” Detailing the grave and deteriorating situation in Iraq, I argued that the debacle was attributable not to individual failures but to a crisis in the entire institution of America’s general officer corps. The piece sparked a fierce debate within the armed forces, catapulted me from obscurity into the national media spotlight, and ultimately ended my military career. I became a dissenter, having declared war on an institution that I’d loved and loyally served for more than twenty years. It was not a role I had imagined for myself.
I joined the Army at the age of seventeen because I had few other options: I was a bad kid in a bad place. I wasted my adolescence drinking, smoking pot, and fighting. Growing up in Pittsburgh as the steel industry was dying, I needed a way out. In 1984, Pittsburgh put more recruits in boots than any other comparably sized city in the country, and I was one of them. I enlisted to straighten myself out, and it worked. Being a soldier taught me self-discipline and self-respect, which was just what I needed. I enrolled in Duquesne University and graduated at the top of my academic class. I won an ROTC scholarship and was commissioned at the top of my ROTC class. I married my high school sweetheart, convincing her that I was not the aimless thug I had once been. I was a college graduate, an Army officer, and a married man, well on my way to a middle-class living and middle-class respectability. I could not imagine wanting anything more for myself.
I trained as a field artillery officer, and in early 1990 reported to the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas. In one of my first field exercises, I was assigned as an evaluator for a fire support team as part of a large exercise involving infantry, tanks, artillery, engineers, and other supporting forces. Greg Fontenot, then lieutenant colonel and senior evaluator for the exercise, would gather the other evaluators together each night and lay out what would happen in the next day’s battle: the plans of enemy and friendly forces, the decisions the commanders would make, the terrain and weather considerations that would influence those decisions, and the possible outcomes of the battle. He told all of us where to be and what to look for. At first, I was skeptical: How could he possibly know what would happen the next day at such a level of detail? After the first battle, though, I became a true believer. Fontenot was a master of battle command; he saw the battle unfold in his mind before it was fought.
Less than a year later, we were in an assault position in northern Saudi Arabia, preparing to attack Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait. My job was to give fire commands to eight cannon that supported the attack of the 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. The brigade’s mission was to breach the frontline Iraqi defenses; we were expected to take so many casualties that follow-on forces would then have to take over the attack on the Republican Guard. Instead, we breached the Iraqi defenses with minimal casualties, conducted a hundred-mile maneuver, pulverized the Republican Guard, and ended the war in one hundred hours. I was as mesmerized by my senior commander, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Emerson, as I had been by Fontenot; he, too, had seen the battle unfold in his mind, prepared for every possibility, and brought the conflict to a swift and decisive conclusion. I looked up to my bosses and vowed to learn what they knew. I loved being a soldier: it was not merely a living but a good life’s work.
Five years later, I was conducting peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia. I had attended the field artillery’s training course for newly promoted captains, where I had read about “operations other than war” in the “post–Cold War era.” The Army used these clumsy terms to describe peacekeeping, humanitarian aid distribution, and just about any mission that didn’t involve fighting the Soviets in Europe. I thought it odd that we would define operations and eras by what they were not. However, I was too pressed by more immediate concerns to give the matter much thought. My unit’s mission was relatively straightforward: to monitor our assigned area for violations of the Dayton Peace Accords, which separated the Bosnian, Serb, and Croat factions in that country’s bloody civil war. However, beyond that narrow task, everything seemed incoherent. I did not know how my small unit’s task fit into a larger plan or what the end state of our operations was to be. Some of the same commanders whom I had so admired in the Gulf War were unable to explain what we were doing or why we were doing it.
The Army selected me to attend graduate school at the University of Chicago and then teach international relations in West Point’s prestigious social sciences department. Entering grad school, I was a capable tactician but no more. Chicago opened my mind to the political aspects of war and the use of military force as an instrument of policy. I read Livy’s account of the campaign waged by Scipio the Younger in Spain during Rome’s Second Punic War and Thucydides’s record of operations carried out by Brasidas in Thrace during the Peloponnesian War of ancient Greece. These generals were not mere tacticians; they wielded military force and diplomacy with equal alacrity toward a clear political goal. I wrote my master’s thesis on third-party military intervention in civil wars, finding a nearly uninterrupted record of failure. I studied extensively with John Mearsheimer, whose classic work Conventional Deterrence melds strategic and operational calculations into a rigorous and seamless whole. Just before graduation, I met Mearsheimer for drinks. He told me, “Paul, you’re smart, and the Army likes officers who are smart. But not too smart. Be careful.” I had no idea what he meant.
While at West Point, I met John Nagl, who over the next twenty years would become my best friend, intellectual sparring partner, and frequent coauthor. John had just finished his doctorate on irregular warfare, which would soon be published as the counterinsurgency classic Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. John’s thinking on military adaptation helped me make sense of my experience in the former Yugoslavia: the same officers who were so skilled in conventional warfare, I realized, had failed to adapt to the irregular conflicts of the Balkans. As Gulf War veterans, John and I were both proud of the Army’s performance in 1991. But he was focused on the future. He asked: “After seeing what we did to Iraq, why would anybody fight us like that again?” That question should have shaped a generation of military thinking. Alas, it did not.
Meanwhile, my career continued to flourish. As a newly promoted and well-regarded major, I was chosen to attend the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). The Army referred to SAMS graduates as Jedi Knights for their skill in war planning. This reputation was well earned: SAMS graduates had been among the principal planners of the Gulf War. The program combined graduate education—I read classical military theorists such as Clausewitz, Mao, and Galula—with military planning exercises. During the course’s sophisticated war games, I served as Napoleon’s chief of staff at the Battle of Leipzig and commanded a German corps in the World War I Battle of the Masurian Lakes. SAMS was the missing piece in my professional education. I had learned tactics on the battlefields of the Middle East and the Balkans, and had studied strategy and politics at Chicago; SAMS taught me how to connect the two. The 9/11 attacks occurred while I was at SAMS, and I was convinced those skills would soon be in high demand.
Upon graduating from SAMS in 2002, I was assigned as the chief of plans for the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea. In both geographic and intellectual terms, the assignment could not have been further from the irregular conflicts that would dominate the decades to come. My task was to develop, maintain, and exercise the division war plans intended to deter conflict, and to defeat a North Korean invasion of South Korea should deterrence fail. Korea was considered a “hardship tour”; my family remained in the United States while I worked eighteen-hour days in an underground bunker. I performed my work with due diligence, all the while recognizing its absurdity. I had analyzed the Korea scenario with Mearsheimer as a graduate student, coming to the conclusion that South Korean forces were more than sufficient to defeat any aggression from the North. Every exercise and every piece of intelligence that I would see during my time in Korea confirmed this judgment. I concluded that the Army’s fixation on Korea had less to do with intelligence than with the Army’s organizational and cultural preference for conventional conflict. Meanwhile, outside of the Korea bubble, the Bush administration was manufacturing a pretext for war in the Middle East.
John Nagl and I frequently discussed the prospects for war in Iraq. By the fall of 2002, it was clear to us that the Bush administration was determined to invade the country. Given the US military’s conventional dominance, we were confident that it could topple Saddam. However, we saw that as the beginning rather than the end of the conflict. The precursors for a long and bloody insurgency were all present in Iraq: conflicting ethnic and religious identities, skillful and ruthless demagogues, ample supplies of money and arms, and a large pool of angry, ignorant, and disaffected young men. We feared that a US invasion would be the match setting this combustible mixture ablaze. While we were worried about challenging the Army too directly, we felt duty bound to raise these concerns. Citing just war theory, we argued that “an officer who wins the war and loses the peace is no more professional than a doctor who saves the patient’s leg at the expense of his spinal cord.”
My education and experience notwithstanding, I never in my life up to this point imagined that I had any role in shaping policy or strategy. I saw myself as a fighter and nothing more; the only thing that had changed was the character of the fighting. I could not picture a world in which important people would care what I had to say. But for John’s friendship, I would never have written or spoken a word in public. John, though, insisted that we had an obligation to think and write about the challenges the Army would soon face in Iraq. This period began a nearly decade-long cycle of “writing and fighting,” where we became increasingly outspoken about our concerns. We would alternately spend our time fighting in combat tours in Iraq and writing about the lessons we’d learned upon our return.
My first tour in Iraq began in August 2003, as second-in-command of an artillery battalion. Returning from my hardship tour in Korea, I had the option of declining to deploy but could not imagine doing so. My unit had been part of the initial invasion force, and I joined midway through its deployment. I went to the operations center and asked the battle captain to brief me on the current situation. Looking at the operations map, I saw an icon representing the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (3rd ACR) on the Iraq–Syria border. I felt some glimmer of reassurance, as border security seemed a sound use of cavalry forces, which are designed for the reconnaissance and security of important terrain. However, I saw no other unit icon in the entirety of Anbar Province—Iraq’s largest, with a population of 1.5 million and an area larger than the state of New York. I assumed this to be an error, but the battle captain assured me that the five thousand troopers of the 3rd ACR were the only forces securing this area. Next, I asked to see the campaign plan. The battle captain handed me a book of brief orders covering routine security and logistics matters. Ever the SAMS graduate, I explained that I needed to see the overall plan describing the desired end state in Iraq and the operations to achieve that end state. The young officer replied that he knew of no such document.
I returned from Iraq deeply concerned about the growing insurgency and the Army’s failure to adapt to this challenge. In my tour, my unit had been assigned the task of training Iraqi Army and police forces. We did our best, but our efforts were entirely improvisational. In 2004, I began advocating that field artillery forces start planning and preparing for the task of developing Iraqi soldiers and police officers in support of counterinsurgency operations. At the time, I was second-in-command of a field artillery brigade in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. My boss, then-colonel K. D. Dahl, was supportive, but his boss—the commanding general of all the artillery brigades in the corps—dismissed the idea out of hand. He told us instead to “focus on Korea.”
This guidance was utterly perplexing, especially since I had briefed that same general on Korea two years earlier during my time as chief of plans for the 2nd Infantry Division. I had told him back then that in a war between North and South Korea, a “counterfire fight”—an artillery duel—would break out immediately, and artillery forces from the continental United States wouldn’t be able to deploy in time to affect the battle. In 2004, for our artillery brigade in Fort Sill to “focus on Korea” meant training thousands of soldiers for a hypothetical scenario where they couldn’t possibly be relevant, instead of making adjustments we needed for the ongoing fight in Iraq.
Later that year, the same commanding general declined to complete an optional officer evaluation report on my performance, a move that derailed my promotion prospects. The overall selection rate for my peers was 90 percent, and the news that I was in the bottom 10 percent of my peer group came as a shock. I had previously been selected for every “top 5 percent” cut in my career—graduate school, instructor duty at West Point, early promotion to major, attendance at SAMS. Every evaluation report in my personnel file was “top block”—the strongest possible recommendation for promotion. Yet none of that counted now. This episode highlights the precarious tightrope that mid-level and senior officers must walk in the military’s “up or out” personnel system. The general could derail my career simply by doing nothing. In such a system, officers can scarcely afford a disagreement with a vindictive boss; a single personality conflict can be a career-ending event.
Difficult as it may have been, my non-selection for promotion to lieutenant colonel was both a test and a gift. Like many successful officers, I had espoused the virtues of selfless service while my own service was constantly recognized and rewarded. Now, although I had done nothing wrong, my career nevertheless appeared to be over. I am ashamed to say that my initial response was self-centered: I prepared to chart a path for life outside the military, even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan spiraled further out of control.
But in late 2004, Colonel Dahl called me into his office. The 3rd ACR needed someone to lead a nonlethal effects team in their upcoming deployment to Iraq, he told me. “Every lieutenant colonel in the brigade has said no. I’d like you to lead this team.”
I was stunned. “Sir, why in the hell would I volunteer for another tour in Iraq after the Army passed me over for lieutenant colonel?”
Dahl replied, “We’re going to send a team of soldiers to war, and you’re the best officer to lead them. If you say no, you won’t be able to live with yourself.” He was right. The next day I volunteered for my second tour in Iraq.
The 3rd ACR was like every other heavy brigade combat team in the Army, only heavier. Every heavy brigade combat team had plenty of mobility and firepower—tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, cannon, and the like. The 3rd ACR had all of that in greater numbers, and its own aircraft to boot. At the time, all the heavy brigade teams were struggling mightily to develop counterinsurgency tactics in the absence of a coherent Army doctrine for irregular warfare. The 3rd ACR took its commitment to this task to a whole new level. The regiment’s junior leaders were as skilled at negotiation as they were at tank gunnery. The regimental staff had plenty of trigger pullers but also PhDs in history and native Arabic speakers. Most important of all, the regimental commander, then-colonel H. R. McMaster, was both soldier and scholar. A history PhD who earned a Silver Star in the 1991 Gulf War, McMaster had authored Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. The book was required reading for every Army officer.
My job was to coordinate the regiment’s nonlethal operations, such as civil affairs, psychological operations, and reconstruction. In practice, that role required me to assist McMaster in dealing with Iraqi sheikhs, politicians, and occasionally leaders of the insurgency. More than once, I heard McMaster tell tribal elders, “I understand your grievances, and the proper place to resolve those grievances is politics. The time for honorable resistance is over. Don’t make me kill your young men to convince you that I’m serious.” I was reminded of Scipio the Younger in Spain maneuvering legions through the countryside, cutting Hannibal’s lines of communication, and welcoming the tribes back to their loyal allegiance to Rome. The message in both cases was clear: politics or death.
The 3rd ACR’s “clear-hold-build” method of counterinsurgency operations is the stuff of legend, and this space cannot properly do it justice. In short, the regiment was assigned responsibility for an insurgent-infested area in northwest Iraq, centering on the city of Tal Afar. The city of 250,000 people was entirely under insurgent control and served as a way station for fighters and supplies heading from Syria to the city of Mosul. The regiment, in combination with Iraqi Army forces, conducted a massive assault to clear Tal Afar of insurgents. Once cleared, these areas were held with Iraqi Army and police forces, supported as necessary by US resources and assistance. Having secured the population from insurgent violence, the regiment then assisted the Iraqi government in rebuilding essential services: health, education, transportation, and local government. McMaster pursued this operation with single-minded tenacity, while working to empower the Iraqi political and military leaders who would have long-term responsibility for the security of Tal Afar.
McMaster’s success was in no small part due simply to his willingness to tell the truth. Most commanders in Iraq, whether because of self-delusion or willful deception, played a game with their reporting on security conditions. They would take over an area of operations at the beginning of a twelve-month tour and declare it a debacle. They’d report that it would take at least fifteen months to create the conditions that would permit handover to Iraqi Army and police forces. Every month of their twelve-month tour, they’d report incremental progress, and declare by the end of their tour that success was just ninety days away. Then a new commander would come in and repeat the same process. McMaster did not play this game. Instead, he cited the specific obstacles to progress, such as lack of Iraqi government ministerial support to forces in the field, corrupt and complicit officials, and inadequate logistics systems. If these conditions did not change, neither did McMaster’s assessment. These blunt assessments infuriated McMaster’s bosses but also garnered the regiment resources unheard of for other brigade combat teams, including national intelligence assets, de facto control of US Special Forces, and a massive infusion of reconstruction funds.
I returned from Iraq in early 2006 both hopeful and furious. The 3rd ACR’s success had demonstrated the effectiveness of clear-hold-build. Nonetheless, Iraq was plunging into civil war. The February 2006 bombing of the Al-Askari Mosque set off a new wave of sectarian violence, even as senior US political and military officials lied about the actual security conditions in Iraq. With both of us back in the United States, John Nagl and I continued our collaboration. While I had been in Tal Afar, working without a coherent counterinsurgency doctrine, John had been working on that very doctrine. He was part of the writing team that put together General David Petraeus’s celebrated FM 3–24: Counterinsurgency. John and I wrote a piece for the Field Artillery Journal, arguing that artillery formations had little relevance in counterinsurgency but that artillerymen could remain relevant by training local army and police forces. In the Armed Forces Journal, we took on the Army’s sclerotic personnel system, which had such a deleterious effect on risk-taking and adaptation. That piece included a passage that would later be quoted by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates: “The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion.”
These works, along with our broader efforts in advocating for the counterinsurgency approach, generated some minor buzz but had little institutional impact. Civil war raged in Iraq, US casualties mounted, and US political and military leaders doubled down on their Pollyannaish “turning the corner” statements. John and I reached a crossroads: the US government was lying about Iraq, and the only way to stop those lies was to get the public’s attention. However, the only way to get the public’s attention was to state the case in terms so explicit that our careers would be over. Much to my surprise, during my second tour in Iraq I had been promoted to lieutenant colonel after all. I looked forward to battalion command but viewed the system that selected me for this honor with utter contempt. John, too, had been selected for battalion command; this position is the gateway to general’s stars. We both had distinguished combat records, and our writing up to that point had made us prominent and controversial but hardly toxic. If we would shut up and play ball, our career prospects looked bright.
By late 2006, I was the deputy commander of the 3rd ACR in Fort Hood, Texas; I would assume command of a field artillery battalion the following spring. One of my responsibilities as deputy commander was to represent the regiment at public events, including the monthly Purple Heart ceremony. At any given time, Fort Hood had nearly twenty thousand soldiers deployed to Iraq, and hundreds came back severely wounded every year. The ceremony to honor these soldiers was a somber one. An adjutant would read the names of the wounded, and the soldiers would come forward, visibly scarred, sometimes in wheelchairs, other times with the assistance of a buddy, parent, or spouse. The senior officer representing the unit would then shake hands with the wounded soldiers, thanking them for their service.
I extended my hand, but for the first time in my life I could not look a soldier in the eye. The soldiers had done their duty: they had faced the enemy in battle and shed their blood in the service of our country. We senior officers had not done our duty: we had not adequately visualized the conditions of combat and prepared our soldiers to face those conditions. We were failing to connect—or adapt—the tactics we preferred to the strategic outcomes we claimed to want. I knew the solutions to these problems but lacked the courage to speak that truth. I was valuing my recently revived career prospects over the lives of the soldiers standing in front of me. Bile rose in my throat; my eyes burned with shame at the realization of my complicity and my cowardice.
I began writing “A Failure in Generalship” that night. My focus was not on one officer or group of officers but on the entire system that the US military uses to select its senior leaders. I accused America’s generals of wasting decades preparing to fight the wrong war. I found them guilty of misleading Congress and the public about the intensity of the insurgency. I excoriated the services for their refusal to hold commanders accountable for battlefield failures, noting that “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” I sent a draft to John, whose keen analytical mind and judgment I found invaluable. He added a section calling on Congress to be involved in the solutions, as congressional interventions are more enduring than any internal service reforms. We circulated drafts to a wider audience of respected soldiers and scholars. Around thirty of our peers made helpful and occasionally contradictory suggestions. On two points they were unanimous: we were right, and publishing this article would end our careers.
After months of revisions, we were ready to publish, with only one point of disagreement: authorship. Whose name would go on the byline? John suggested anonymous authorship; I found an anonymous call for moral courage impossibly self-contradictory. We finally agreed that I would publish the piece in my name alone. John was making incremental progress in the “inside game” of defense reform. We saw little point in setting two careers on fire when one would do.
“A Failure in Generalship,” as we predicted, created a firestorm. The Washington Post ran a front-page story titled “Army Officer Accuses Generals of ‘Intellectual and Moral Failures.’” The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox, NPR, and other national media outlets followed suit. Junior military members began openly questioning senior military leaders about our allegations of failure in Iraq. Members of Congress weighed in, publicly praising the candor of the piece and privately warning the Army against retaliation. The great paradox is that so many people were shocked by the argument, yet it contained little original thought. Sergeants had known for years about the shoddy counterinsurgency training and equipment, as well as the lack of accountability among senior officers. Captains had long decried the lack of effective irregular warfare doctrine in private conversations. However, the article gave both permission and a pathway to make these concerns public.
As expected, the article ended my career. America’s soldiers have suffered far worse fates than mine, and I see no value in going into the particulars. Instead, I’ll merely point out that the last five years of my military service were a cacophony of absurdities. I took command of my battalion, but the Army reassigned all my soldiers to perform counterinsurgency missions under other commanders. My work was taught at the Army War College—a program for senior officers considered to have significant potential for promotion—but the Army did not select me to attend the program myself. I was promoted to colonel after all but was passed over for command at that rank. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff summoned me for a private audience to express concern about my career prospects but declined to intervene to alter those prospects. In private emails and whispered conversations, politicians and generals confided that they agreed with me, but none of them spoke out publicly. In 2012, I retired from the Army to take a job teaching high school history. I refused to have a public retirement ceremony, as such an event would necessarily involve a boilerplate statement about how much the Army valued my service. I knew this statement to be a lie, and I could not tolerate any more lies.
Reflecting on a tumultuous decade as a military dissenter, I know both contentment and regret. Where much is given, much is expected, and my countrymen had every right to expect much of me. By the grace of God, I was blessed with a capacity to make powerful arguments. By the generosity of the American people, I was able to use that gift in the country’s service. I published tens of thousands of words on leadership and adaptation, and I will not recant a single one. My arguments were not mere scholarly abstractions; I put those words into action during my service in Iraq. For a time, the Army seemed to take those arguments seriously, undertaking reforms in personnel policy and irregular warfare doctrine. However, as the pressures of the battlefields of the Middle East recede, the Army seems to be reverting to form. Still, though, the play goes on; I am content to have contributed a verse.
Even so, I regret how I treated people along the way. For ten years, I burned with a white-hot rage that frequently boiled over into self-righteousness. I used my gifts to not only advance my ideas but also humiliate those who disagreed with me. When the longtime editor of Field Artillery Journal balked at publishing the article that John and I wrote about field artillery’s growing irrelevance, for example, I went over her head to force the issue. Attacking her life’s work with the same ruthlessness I had applied to America’s enemies on the battlefield, I got a two-star general to overrule her objections. No matter whom I clashed with, the only options I could imagine were cooperation or elimination.
I did not seek out the perspective of those who disagreed with me. In fact, I scarcely recognized their humanity. I was in a hurry, and they were in the way. Being able to make others look foolish is a dangerous talent, and I went at it with abandon. Only in hindsight do I see the irony in a purported counterinsurgency expert who used power so indiscriminately and made enemies so profligately.
I regret not having been kinder.