Notes

Most of the material in this book is based on interviews with more than one hundred players. Their names are listed after these notes, though the interviews themselves were conducted on a confidential basis. I have not footnoted information that comes strictly from interviews, though in almost every case I have confirmed the facts from at least two sources. When something is based in part on published sources and in part on interviews, I cite the source, then add “and interviews.”

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

Lieutenant Nagl was a platoon leader: 1st Lieutenant John Nagl, “A Tale of Two Battles: Victorious in Iraq, An Experienced Armor Task Force Gets Waxed at the NTC,” Armor, May–June 1992; and interviews.

if you can lick the cat: The phrase is widely attributed to General Curtis LeMay, commander of the US Strategic Air Command in the 1950s.

published as a book: John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002; reprinted in paperback by University of Chicago Press, 2005).

“An Insurgent Within the COIN Revolution”: Dr. Conrad Crane, PowerPoint presentation, New York City, May 2006 (provided to author). Crane, as we shall later see, was General David Petraeus’s chief collaborator on the COIN field manual, which was being written at the time.

“COINdinistas”: A defense reporter and former Marine named Carl Prine has claimed (and regretted) credit for inventing the term; he also came up with “COINtras” as a name for the group’s critics, though that never caught on. See www.lineofdeparture.com/2011/04/25/dazed-and-coinfused.

West Point was where . . . General George Washington: “A History of West Point,” www.usma.edu/history.asp

“Two Hundred Years of Tradition”: Nobody seems to know who first came up with this one, though in some recitations, “unhindered” is rendered as “unmarred” or “unimpeded.”

George Arthur Lincoln: For biographical information, see Lincoln’s personal history sheet on his application to West Point, in George A. Lincoln Collection, Biographical Cover, US Military Academy Archive, West Point, NY; Obituary, “George Arthur Lincoln, Class of 1929,” Assembly (published by Association of Graduates, US Military Academy), March 1976, 121; Charles F. Brower Jr., “Sophisticated Strategist: Gen. George A. Lincoln and the Defeat of Japan,” Diplomatic History, Summer 1991; Captain Martha S. H. VanDriel, “The Lincoln Brigade: One Story of the Faculty of the USMA Department of Social Science,” n.d., on file at the Social Science Dept., US Military Academy (although VanDriel mistakenly reports that Lincoln was a two-star general before taking his demotion, when he was a one-star, and that he asked Marshall for the demotion when in fact he asked Eisenhower).

thirteen Rhodes Scholars: Letter, George A. Lincoln to Herman Beukema, April 23, 1947, George A. Lincoln Collection, Box 3.

“very broad-gauged individuals”: Letter, Lincoln to Beukema, March 16, 1946, ibid.

“a little late”: Letter, Lincoln to Beukema, August 27, 1946, ibid.

“I am beginning to think”: Letter, Lincoln to Beukema, May 20, 1945, ibid.

the two officers struck up a correspondence: Besides the ones cited here, see also Letters, Lincoln to Beukema, December 16, 1945; February 12, July 20, July 22, 1946, ibid.

“baptizing”: Letter, Lincoln to Beukema, November 20, 1945, ibid.

made it clear: Letter, Beukema to Lincoln, December 19, 1945, ibid.

In August 1945, soon after: “Summary of Plan for Returning to Four-Year Course,” August 18, 1945, George A. Lincoln Collection, Box 100, “Report of Post-War Curriculum Committee” folder.

In June 1946, Congress passed a bill: Letter, Beukema to Lincoln, June 26, 1946, George A. Lincoln Collection, Box 3.

In July, Lincoln told Beukema: Letters, Lincoln to Beukema, July 14, 19, and 22, 1946, ibid.

Lincoln started his new job: Letter, Lincoln to Beukema, March 10, 1947, ibid.

West Point’s curriculum: See “Summary of Plan for Returning to Four-Year Course,” op. cit.

Lincoln wrote one: George A. Lincoln and Norman J. Padelford, International Politics: Foundations of International Relations (NY: Macmillan, 1954).

“I am certain that we must make”: Letter, Lincoln to Beukema, May 17, 1947, George A. Lincoln Collection, Box 3.

“a couple of left-wing pinko”: General Norman Schwarzkopf, Lecture at West Point, May 15, 1991; and interviews. (Schwarzkopf’s lecture was videotaped; a DVD copy of the video was provided to author.)

“Pick good people”: Quoted in obituary, “George Arthur Lincoln,” Assembly, op. cit.

Chapter 2: “Another Type of Warfare”

“Every cadet an athlete”: Quoted in “A Brief History of West Point,” www.usma.edu/history.asp.

Petraeus, who was ranked forty-third: David Cloud and Greg Jaffe, The Fourth Star (New York: Crown, 2009), 18; and interviews.

Shortly after graduating: Ibid., 21; and interviews.

Marcel “Bruno” Bigeard: See obituary, London Telegraph, July 22, 2011; and interviews.

Bernard Fall’s volumes about Vietnam: Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (New York: Lippincott, 1966); Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Vietnam (New York: Schocken Books, 1961).

The Centurions: It was published in a bestselling English translation in 1961, and turned into a popular movie, Lost Command, in 1966. But it is presently out of print and, perhaps because it’s known to be General Petraeus’s favorite novel, selling for several hundred dollars on the secondhand market.

“When we make war”: Jean Larteguy, The Centurions (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961), 181–82.

“the ‘how-to’ book in the field”: Fall, Street Without Joy, 400.

He had just retired from the French army: Ann Marlowe, David Galula: His Life and Intellectual Context (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2010), esp. 21ff.

“Revolutionary war . . . special rules”: David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1964), xii. (Page numbers refer to the 2006 paperback edition published in Praeger Security International’s series “The Classics of the Counterinsurgency Era,” with a foreword by John A. Nagl.)

“In a fight between a fly”: Ibid., xii–xiii.

the “insurgent” and the “counterinsurgent”: Ibid., xiv.

“to define the laws”: Ibid., xiii (italics added).

“is fluid because he has neither”: Ibid., 7.

fish swimming in water: Ibid., 33–34.

In his days as a military attaché: Marlowe, op. cit., 25–32.

“step-by-step” process: Galula, op. cit., 55–56.

a matter not of adding: Ibid., 61.

“20 percent military”: Ibid., 63.

“[C]onventional operations by themselves”: Ibid., 51–52.

“be prepared to become a propagandist”: Ibid., 62.

“a mimeograph machine”: Ibid., 66.

“primarily a war of infantry”: Ibid., 21, 65.

Meanwhile, at the end of 1978: Cloud and Jaffe, op. cit., 35–42; and interviews.

Jack Galvin was an unusual Army general: James Kitfield, Prodigal Soldiers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 68, passim; and interviews.

Over the years, . . . he would write . . . books: Galvin, The Minute Men: The First Fight—Myths and Realities of the American Revolution (Portland, OR: Hawthorne Books, 1967); Three Men of Boston (John R. Crowell, 1976); Air Assault: The Development of Air Mobile Warfare (Portland, OR: Hawthorne Books, 1969).

“Holy cow!” Petraeus thought to himself: Interviews for this book were conducted mainly on “background,” but I should clarify that whenever I have someone saying or thinking something, and there’s no endnote given, the source is almost always the person saying it; on a very few occasions (not this one), it’s someone who heard him say it or to whom he recited his thoughts.

By the time the war ended: Cynthia J. Arnson, Crossroads: Congress, the President, and Central America, 1976–1993 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2d ed., 1993); Todd Greentree, Crossroads of Intervention: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Lessons from Central America (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008); John D. Waghelstein, “Military-to-Military Contacts: Personal Observations—The El Salvador Case,” Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement, Summer 2003.

Kennedy set up a secret panel: See Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance (New York: Free Press, 1977), 64ff.

“another type of warfare”: Quoted in John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 125.

CORDS was led by . . . Robert Komer: See especially Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie (New York: Random House, 1988), 652–57.

The whole branch was seen as a career dead-ender: Colonel John D. Waghelstein, El Salvador: Observations and Experiences in Counterinsurgency (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 1985), introduction; and interviews.

Brigadier General Fred Woerner: The so-called Woerner Report was declassified only in 1993 and, even then, with many deletions and after a long legal battle, waged by Kate Doyle and the National Security Archive. www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/DOCUMENT/930325.htm.

Woerner drafted a National Campaign Plan: As far as I can tell, the plan is still classified; it’s unclear whether there ever was a document beyond the briefing delivered to the Salvadoran government. However, it is summarized in detail in Waghelstein, op. cit., v–vi, 48–62, and Appendix G. I also received some information from interviews.

John Waghelstein, a Special Forces colonel: Waghelstein, “What’s Wrong in Iraq: Or Ruminations of a Pachyderm,” Military Review, January–February 2006.

“Simply killing guerrillas”: Waghelstein, El Salvador, 62.

Woerner’s National Campaign Plan, at this point: Ibid., 64–66.

“LIC is a growth industry”: Clifford Krauss and Tim Carrington, “Latin Lesson: US Effort to Win ‘Hearts and Minds’ Gains in El Salvador,” Wall Street Journal, September 8, 1986.

in fact, he and several of the Special Forces officers: Waghelstein, op. cit., 40; and interviews.

We in the military: General John R. Galvin, “Uncomfortable Wars: Toward a New Paradigm,” Parameters, Winter 1986.

“General Galvin’s words were relevant then”: Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq,” Military Review, January–February 1986.

The “reluctance to get involved”: David Howell Petraeus, The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era. PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1987, 287.

“come to grips”: Ibid., 309. See also 281–82.

“Lessons of history”: Ibid., 292, 297.

“We should be careful”: Ibid., 299.

“will depend . . . on forthcoming”: Ibid., 279.

“crippling naivete”: Quoted in ibid., 282–83n. The fate of Krepinevich’s book, and his meeting with Petraeus, come from interviews.

Chapter 3: “Eating Soup with a Knife”

“decimated by a light-infantry company”: 1st Lieutenant John Nagl, “A Tale of Two Battles: Victorious in Iraq, An Experienced Armor Task Force Gets Waxed at the NTC,” Armor, May–June 1992; and interviews.

While pursuing this odd new interest: He was especially drawn to Alexander George, “Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured, Focused Comparison,” in Paul Gordon Lauren, ed., Diplomacy (New York: Macmillan, 1979); and interviews.

“best explained by the differing”: John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, xxii. (The book was first published in hardcover by Praeger, in 2002, with the title and subtitle switched, at Praeger’s insistence. The page numbers cited, here and elsewhere, are from the University of Chicago paperback edition.)

“You know, some brigadiers”: Ibid., 74–75.

“an understanding of the nature”: Ibid., 41.

“I have been impressed”: Ibid., 97.

“the eradication of threats”: Ibid., 43.

“the strategy of annihilation”: Quoted in ibid., from Russell Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Policy and Strategy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), xxii.

“were quickly lost to the belief”: Nagl, ibid., 46.

“another type of warfare”: Quoted in ibid., 126.

“strategic hamlets”: Ibid., 164–66.

General Creighton Abrams: Ibid., 168–72, 175. This same point is made by Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, which Nagl cites.

General William Westmoreland: Ibid., 200.

In the spring of 1965, in response: Ibid., 130–31.

“I guess I should have studied”: Quoted in ibid., 142.

After the war, he was put in charge: Ibid., 206. The Army field manual that DePuy led was the 1976 edition of FM 100-5: Operations. It sparked enormous controversy, not so much from “small wars” advocates, of whom there were few (and fewer still who had interest in publicizing their views on this score), but more from those who thought DePuy’s views of strategy were too static, defense-minded, and unrealistically mathematical.

“Like most Americans who served in Vietnam”: Quoted in Nagl, ibid., 203.

“may well have been an aberration”: Ibid., 222–23.

The title he emblazoned: Nagl titled his DPhil dissertation Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: British and American Army Counterinsurgency Learning During the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War. In its first book form, published by Praeger in October 2002, during (coincidentally) the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the title and (a pared-down version of) the subtitle were reversed, at the editor’s insistence and over Nagl’s opposition, as Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. At a retail price of $81.95, it lured few buyers; as discussed later, it gained cult status mainly through word-of-mouth and Nagl’s PowerPoint summaries. The University of Chicago paperback edition, published in September 2005, as (again coincidentally) the US occupation of Iraq was about to spin out of control, for a more commercially appealing $17, sold (relatively speaking) in droves.

Chapter 4: Revolutions

A new Army field manual stated: Janine Davidson, Lifting the Fog of Peace: How Americans Learned to Fight Modern War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 114; and interviews.

“Real men don’t do moot-wah”: Quoted in ibid., 143.

The revolution in military affairs began: Much of this section is based on parts of chapter 1 of my book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2008). In addition to the documents noted below, the material here also comes from interviews conducted, during research for Daydream, with Richard Armitage, David Deptula, Richard Garwin, Andrew Krepinevich, Andrew Marshall, Donald Rice, James Wade, Huba Wass de Czege, and Barry Watts.

John Foster, a nuclear physicist: Richard H. Van Atta, et al., Transformation and Transition: DARPA’s Role in Fostering an Emerging Revolution in Military Affairs, Vol. 1—Overall Assessment, IDA Paper P-3698 (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2003), 40.

“identify and characterize”: DARPA and Defense Nuclear Agency, Summary Report of the Long Range Research and Development Planning Program, DNA–75– 03055, February 7, 1975 (declassified December 31, 1983). The primary author of the study was Albert Wohlstetter, a prominent nuclear strategist who, through the 1950s, had been a colleague, and initially a mentor, of Andrew Marshall at the RAND Corporation. For more about Wohlstetter and Marshall in those days, see my book The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), esp. chs. 6 and 7.

In the summer of 1986: Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Discriminate Deterrence, January 1988. Wohlstetter and another former RAND analyst, Fred Iklé, were the main authors of this report as well.

The final version was finished: Department of the Air Force, The Air Force and U.S. National Security: Global Reach—Global Power, A White Paper, June 1990. See also Major Barbara J. Faulkenberry, Global Reach—Global Power: Air Force Strategic Vision, Past and Future (Maxwell Air Force Base: Air University Press, 1996), 46.

A few had been dropped toward the end of the Vietnam War: Barry Watts, Six Decades of Guided Munitions and Battle Networks (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments, 2007), 185ff.; Kenney Werrell, “Did USAF Technology Fail in Vietnam?” Airpower Journal, Spring 1998.

Deptula had drawn up a chart: Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War (New York: Little Brown, 1995), ch. 4; and interviews.

The actual upshot turned: Thomas Keaney and Eliot Cohen, Revolution in Warfare? Air Power in the Persian Gulf (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995), esp. 191. This was a declassified version of the executive summary of the Air Force’s official study of airpower in the Gulf War. The conclusions were so discomfiting that the report was thrown out (it has long gone missing), and the book version was published by the Naval Institute Press.

Now he was assessing: Krepinevich was one of the few COIN advocates who also celebrated RMA and transformation. In 1992, Krepinevich presented a summary of his work for Marshall at the Naval Postgraduate School. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who knew Krepinevich’s work on Vietnam, asked him, “Andy, if we’d had all these great weapons in Vietnam, would we have still lost?” Krepinevich laughed but thought it over; it was a serious question. He reasoned that Vietnam and a NATO–Warsaw Pact war were two different wars, requiring different strategies. Blitzkrieg worked for the Germans in Poland and France; it wouldn’t have worked in an invasion of England.

“Quality is becoming far more important”: The paper was declassified a decade later and published, with a foreword by Marshall, as Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment (Washington, DC: Center for Strategy and Budgetary Assessments, 2002). CSBA is Krepinevich’s think tank.

“We are on the cusp”: National Defense Panel, Transforming Defense, December 1987, iii.

“revolution in the technology of war”: Governor George W. Bush, “A Period of Consequences,” speech, the Citadel, September 23, 1999.

“to stun, and then rapidly defeat”: Harlan Ullman and James Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Philadelphia: Pavilion Press, 1998).

Soon after the war began, Franks: Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 35.

“the ongoing revolution”: Department of Defense, The Quadrennial Defense Review Report, September 30, 2001, esp. 6, 23, 27, 44.

Then, on October 15: The story has been told many times. E.g., Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (New York: Gotham, 2006), 369–73; Fred Kaplan, “High-Tech US Arsenal Proves Its Worth,” Boston Globe, December 9, 2001.

Rumsfeld was overstating the case: Stephen Biddle, “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2003; Sean Naylor, Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (New York: Berkley Books, 2005), esp. 56–57.

AirLand Battle: US Army, FM 100-5 (Revised), 1981; see also Huba Wass de Czege, “How to Change an Army,” Military Review, November 1984; “Advanced Studies,” Soldier, July 1986.

In the early 1990s: Richard M. Swain, Lucky War: Third Army in Desert Storm (Fort Leavenworth: US Army Command & General Staff College Press, 1994), ch. 3.

“tend to devote more attention”: Wass de Czege published a slightly condensed version of this memo as “Wargaming Insights,” Army, March 2003. (The original memo, which he gave me, is called “’02 Wargaming Insights.”)

Chapter 5: The Insurgent at War

He would later joke that getting shot: Cloud and Jaffe, op. cit., 97; cf. also 94–97, 115. The stories of the injuries are told in most accounts of Petraeus’s life. Rick Atkinson, In the Company of Soldiers (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2005), 37–38, 72; and interviews.

After one of these sessions: Cloud and Jaffe, 98; and interviews.

a presence of al Qaeda fighters: Robert M. Cassidy, Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006); Douglas Frantz, “US-Based Charity Is Under Scrutiny,” New York Times, June 14, 2002; “Islamic Charity Still Faces Charges,” New York Times, May 14, 2002; and interviews.

Petraeus arrived the next day: The account of Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul is based mainly on interviews but also on Kirsten Lundberg, The Accidental Statesman: General Petraeus and the City of Mosul, Iraq (Kennedy School of Government Case Program, C15-06-1834.0, Harvard University, 2006); and Isaiah Wilson, Thinking Beyond War: Civil-Military Relations and Why America Fails to Win the Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

CPA Order No. 1: At this writing, nearly ten years after the fact, it is still not known who wrote Bremer’s orders or where the idea behind them came from. Bremer wrote in his memoir (My Year in Iraq [New York: Threshold Editions, 2006]) that Doug Feith, an undersecretary of defense and member of Rumsfeld’s inner circle, handed him the orders before he left for Iraq. Rumsfeld, in his memoir (Known and Unknown [New York: Penguin Sentinel, 2012], 514–18), puts all blame on Bremer and the State Department (even though Bremer reported to him at the Pentagon) and acknowledges that the issues addressed by the orders “did not receive the full interagency discussion [they] merited.” But in fact, they were discussed in detail at two NSC Principals’ Meetings. At one, on March 10, 2003, everyone in attendance—including President Bush—agreed that the vast majority of Baathists should be allowed to stay in the government and that the senior members (estimated to be about 5 percent of the total) would be vetted by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, modeled on those in postapartheid South Africa and parts of post-Communist Eastern Europe. At the other meeting, on March 12, they all agreed to disband the Republican Guard but to call the regular army back to duty after a proper vetting of the senior officer corps. Bremer’s orders, whoever wrote them, contravened these presidential decisions. Bush, who found out about them the way everyone else did (from the daily newspapers), let it go, saying Bremer should be given leeway. (See my account of the NSC meetings in Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 150–52.) My guess is that the orders were the creation of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who had enormous influence in the Bush White House and Pentagon and who’d long been lobbying for an invasion. First, he was a fanatical proponent of total de-Baathification (after Saddam’s ouster, Chalabi managed to get himself appointed as chairman of the official de-Baathification board). Second, he’d organized a militia of exiles, called the Free Iraqi Forces, that he wanted to supplant the Iraqi army. (The FIF melted into the Iraqi crowd upon landing and was never heard from again.) Another guess is that the orders came to Chalabi via Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. First, Chalabi had several close allies there. Second, Cheney’s office has remained the most tight-lipped chamber of the Bush administration; the fact that the orders’ origins have remained secret, after all these years, suggests (like Sherlock Holmes’s case of the dog that didn’t bark) Cheney as the source.

Two months before they left: 101st Airborne Division (Assault), PowerPoint Briefing, Transition: Outstanding Issues and Concerns (obtained by author).

Instead, they focused: The brigade, with its Stryker light armored vehicles, was deployed to Iraq in October 2003, initially joining the 4th Infantry Division in the extremely violent Sunni Triangle districts in the central part of the country. The 4th ID commander, Major General Roy Odierno, assigned them to exclusively “kinetic” tasks: i.e., killing, raiding, and capturing. That was their introduction to the war, and that was what they continued when assigned to replace the 101st Airborne in Mosul. (Interviews.)

“There was no Phase IV plan”: Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III, “Thinking Beyond War: Civil-Military Operational Planning in Northern Iraq,” speech, Peace Studies Program, Cornell University, October 14, 2004. He gave a similar speech to the annual conference of the American Political Science Association in early September.

Tom Ricks: Thomas E. Ricks, “Army Historian Cites Lack of Postwar Plan: Major Calls Effort in Iraq ‘Mediocre,’” Washington Post, December 25, 2004; and interviews.

Chapter 6: The Irregulars

One of them drew a parody: Peter Maass, “Professor Nagl’s War,” New York Times Magazine, January 11, 2004.

“something of a blithe sense”: In the introduction to the paperback edition, Nagl assesses the strengths and weaknesses of his book from the vantage of having fought in a real insurgency war (Nagl, op. cit., xii).

Nagl remembered a line: Quoted in Maass, op. cit.

Nagl was surprised by how much: Nagl, op. cit., xiii.

“Iraq 2003–2004”: Maass, op. cit.

“protracted guerrilla war”: Gary Anderson, “Saddam’s Greater Game,” Washington Post, April 2, 2003.

“represent the normal”: US Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (1940) (published commercially by Skyhorse Publishing, 2009), 2–3.

“three-block war”: General Charles Krulak, “The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War,” Marines Magazine, January 1999.

There was family lineage: Late in 1962, JFK sent Krulak and Joseph Mendenhall, a senior Foreign Service Officer with experience in Vietnam, on a fact-finding trip to gauge the progress of the war and the stability of Diem’s regime. Krulak reported that everything was great; Mendenhall, in retrospect correctly, said the opposite. After their briefings, Kennedy said, “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?” David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), 339 (page number refers to the Hawcett paperback edition).

He moved on to West Java: This story comes from George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy,” New Yorker, December 18, 2006. The rest of the section comes from interviews and, a bit, from David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. prologue and ch. 1.

“The thing that drives these guys”: Quoted in Packer, op. cit.

Kilcullen’s briefing: Lieutenant Colonel (Dr.) David Kilcullen, PowerPoint, “United States Counterinsurgency: An Australian View” (provided to author); and interviews.

The last QDR: US Dept. of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, September 30, 2001, www.dod.gov/pubs/qdr2001.pdf.

While he was in Anbar: Maass, op. cit.

Chapter 7: “Where’s My Counterinsurgency Plan?”

“become more like”: Quoted in Thomas Baines, “An Assessment of Joint Doctrine,” Center for Defense Information, March 2001.

“warrior-diplomats”: Quoted in Eli Cohen and Noel Tichy, “Operation-Leadership,” Fast Company, August 31, 1999.

In the year Schoomaker wrote: Cited by Braddock Caesar, “Reshaping the Army Through Reconcilement [sic] of Conventional and Special Forces,” Commandos and Special Operations Discussion Board, January 6, 2006. www.strategypage.com/militaryforums/516-867.aspx.

In 1974 he’d gone to Ranger School: Cloud and Jaffe, op. cit., 21–22.

“Partnership: From Occupation”: HQ, MNF-I, Baghdad, Multi-National Force-Iraq, Campaign Plan: Operation Iraqi Freedom, Partnership: From Occupation to Constitutional Elections, August 5, 2004 (declassified).

“Successful and Unsuccessful”: Reprinted in Kalev I. Sepp, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, May–June 2005.

“The enemy we’re fighting”: Jim Dwyer, “A Gulf Commander Sees a Longer Road,” New York Times, March 28, 2003.

In Darley’s first year, he published twenty-nine: David H. Ucko, The New Counter-insurgency Era: Transforming the US Military for Modern Wars (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 77.

The footnoted essay appeared: Military Review, May–June 2005. cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/fullbrowser/collection/p124201coll1/id/171/rv/singleitem. The articles were Montgomery McFate, “Iraq: The Social Context of IEDs”; Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cassidy, “The British Army and Counterinsurgency: The Salience of Military Culture”; Charles Byler, “Pacifying the Moros: American Military Government in the Southern Philippines, 1899–1913”; and Lieutenant Colonel Conrad Crane, “Phase IV Operations: Where Wars Are Really Won.”

Chapter 8: The Basin Harbor Gang

Over the next few years, Cohen emerged: Along with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Abrams, and others, Cohen signed the June 3, 1997, “statement of principles” of the Project for the New American Century, the prominent neocon group that called for greater military spending, unabashed American preeminence in the post–Cold War world, and, starting in the following year, “regime change” in Iraq. (See www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm.) He advocated the forcible overthrow of Saddam Hussein in two early Wall Street Journal op-ed pieces: “World War IV: Let’s Call This Conflict What It Is” (November 20, 2001) and “Iraq Can’t Resist Us” (December 23, 2001).

the study’s executive summary: Eliot A. Cohen and Thomas A. Keaney, Revolution in Warfare? Air Power in the Persian Gulf (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995); and interviews.

The year before, Cohen had coauthored: Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Free Press, 1990).

There was another factor: Cohen wrote an unusually impassioned, much-discussed article about his personal and political anguish, “A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War,” Washington Post, Outlook section, July 20, 2005. He also talked at length about the article and what drove him to write it on C-Span’s Q&A program on July 31, 2005, www.qanda.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1034.

Others on Cohen’s list: The full list of participants can be found at www.sais-jhu.edu/merrillcenter-original/workshops/2005/Participant_list.pdf; the backstory is from interviews.

They met twice a day: For the schedule, see www.sais-jhu.edu/sebin/y/d/Schedule2005.pdf; backstory from interviews.

Some of the participants recited: A summary of the workshop’s discussion can be found at merrillcenter.sais-jhu.edu/outreach/Summary2005.pdf; and interviews.

The 4th Infantry had entered the war late: Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), esp. 232–34, 279–90; and (mostly) interviews.

“We in the Army don’t think”: This remark is quoted in Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 109. But the details of the speech, and the audience’s response, come from my interviews with nine participants at the conference, whose accounts were consistent with one another, on most points identical. I should note that General Odierno told me that he remembers giving a talk at Basin Harbor but has no memory of what he said. When I recited other sources’ accounts of his talk (without identifying their names), he said that none of it rang a bell.

Chapter 9: The Directive

“especially relevant today”: General Peter J. Schoomaker, foreword to John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, x.

“Stability and reconstruction missions”: Defense Science Board 2004 Summer Study, Transition to and from Hostilities, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, 2004, www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA430116.pdf.

Stability operations are a core: Department of Defense Directive No. 3000.05, “Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations,” signed by Gordon England, acting deputy secretary of defense, November 28, 2005.

“long war . . . a war that is irregular”: Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, February 6, 2006, 1.

“conduct a large-scale”: Ibid., 38.

“a new breed of warrior”: Ibid., 42.

“new direction”: Ibid., 4.

“There is a tendency”: Ibid., v.

“it is important to note”: Ibid., ix.

Chapter 10: The Insurgent in the Engine Room of Change

Had it been up to: Harvey had been acting secretary of the Army since the previous September, but the Senate had only recently confirmed him.

“Sir . . . that is the stupidest thing”: Cloud and Jaffe, op. cit., 210; and interviews.

Petraeus’s outlook on his own status: In his official end-of-tour interview as CAC commander, Petraeus said: “I have to tell you candidly, when I was told I was going to be the CAC commander, I thought, ‘What do you do out there? Harass the students in CGSC [Command and General Staff College] that day? What is this all about?’” (William G. Robertson and Kevin D. Crow, CAC History Office, “End of Tour Interview with Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, Commandant, Combined Arms Center,” January 27, 2007, 42); and interviews.

It was a long drive: Ibid., 2; and interviews.

Wallace told the historian: William G. Robertson and Kevin D. Crow, “Interview with Lieutenant General William S. Wallace, Commandant, Combined Arms Center,” September 8, 2005; and interviews.

Early on, Petraeus visited: Robertson and Crow, “End of Tour Interview with Lieutenant General David Petraeus,” op. cit., 36–37; and interviews.

“is a protracted politico-military”: US Army, FMI-3-07.22, Counterinsurgency Operations, October 2004.

The students were brutal: Comments provided to author.

He finished the slide show: Briefing provided to author. The subsequent article, Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq,” was published in Military Review, January– February 2006. Petraeus credited Nagl’s book with inspiring the title change during his talk at the Workshop on the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Fort Leavenworth, February 23–24, 2006; the entire conference was videotaped; a DVD transfer was provided to author.

“great strides”: Remarks by Lieutenant General David Petraeus, CSIS, “Iraq’s Evolving Forces,” November 7, 2005, www.comw.org/warreport/fulltext/0512petraeus.pdf.

The event was a conference: The agenda and list of participants can be found at www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/programareas/conferences/november2005.php.

“Observation number one”: Prepared text of Petraeus’s speech, provided to author. There is no transcript.

“Not as well as it should . . . and that’s why”: Dr. Don Wright, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, “Interview with John Nagl,” October 20, 2010; and interviews.

The five of them sat at a table: There is a slight disagreement over whether Nagl scribbled the outline on a napkin or a notepad. Nagl, Davidson, and Simpson insist it was a napkin; Lacquement recalls it as a notepad; Teamey can’t remember. So I went with a napkin. Either way, the document is now lost; Nagl says he’s looked for it several times, to no avail. However, he also proposed an outline in an email to Conrad Crane (provided to author), dated November 18, 2005, just ten days later, and Nagl (to whom I sent a copy of the email to refresh his memory) says the contents are basically the same as what he’d written at the restaurant. I am quoting or paraphrasing from the email.

“the ubiquitous John Nagl”: Video, COIN Field Manual Workshop, Fort Leavenworth, February 23–24, 2006 (provided to author).

One of the speakers was Conrad Crane: www.sais-jhu.edu/merrillcenter-original/Iraq_Panel2_Summary.pdf.

Crane wrote a paper: Conrad Crane, “Avoiding Vietnam: The US Army’s Response to Defeat in Southwest Asia,” Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, September 2002.

Crane led the team: Conrad Crane and Andrew Terrill, Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, January 1, 2003; reprinted by University Press of the Pacific, October 2004).

“It is an imposing task”: Email, Crane to Petraeus, November 17, 2005 (provided to author).

“Super news, Conrad”: Email, Petraeus to Crane, November 17, 2005 (provided to author).

“some major distractions”: Email, Crane to Petraeus, op. cit.

“and sincere concern for your health”: Email and attachments, Nagl to Crane, November 18, 2005. Petraeus must have bcc’d Nagl the correspondence, as there is no “cc” designation in the headers.

These activities could include electronic jamming: US Army, FM-3-13, Information Operations: Doctrine, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, November 2003.

even getting the Carr Center: The center contributed $10,000.

“COIN Principles, Imperatives and Paradoxes”: These were first published, around the time of the conference, as Eliot Cohen, Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Conrad Crane, Lieutenant Colonel Jan Horvath, and Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, “Principles, Imperatives, and Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, March–April 2006. They also appear, in significantly revised form, in US Army, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations, December 2006, ch. 1. They are discussed in Conrad Crane, “United States,” in Thomas Rid and Thomas Keaney, Understanding Counterinsurgency: Doctrine, Operations and Challenges (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 61–63; and interviews.

Chapter 11: The Workshop at Tatooine

Petraeus brought the meeting to order: The entire conference was videotaped. A DVD transfer of the full proceedings was provided to author. All quotes and paraphrases come from that disc. The background, behind-the-scenes conversations, and people’s thoughts come from interviews.

Back in the 1980s: Manwaring did this study as codirector of a project at US Southern Command called the Small Wars Operations Research Directorate, or SWORD. (The acronym came first; what it stood for was contrived after the fact.) John T. Fishel and Max G. Manwaring, Uncomfortable Wars Revisited (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006); Fishel and Manwaring, “The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency: A Summary and Update,” Small Wars Journal, December 20, 2008; and interviews.

“should strive to avoid imposing”: US Army Field Manual, 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations, December 2006, III–11.

“a culturally acceptable level”: Ibid., III–12.

John Waghelstein, who had been the MilGroup: see ch. 2.

Even Galula, his other model: Galula recounts the brick oven episode in David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958, RAND Corp., December 1963 (reprinted by RAND in 2006), 118–19. He sums up the tale: “This police work was not to my liking, but it was vital and therefore I accepted it. My only concerns were (1) that it be kept within decent limits, and (2) that it not produce irreparable damage to my more constructive pacification work.”

His book: Bing West, The Village: The True Story of 17 Months in the Life of a Vietnamese Village, Where a Handful of American Volunteers and Vietnamese Militia Lived and Died Together Trying to Defend It (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

“at every echelon”: US Army Field Manual, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency Operations, “(Final Draft—Not for Implementation),” June 2006, 1-18 to 1-19; leaked to the press, printed in full by Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy News at www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24fd.pdf.

“a clear . . . appreciation”: US Army Field Manual, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, December 15, 2006, 1-23. (This is the actual published field manual.)

Bill Darley, the journal’s editor: The article was in the March–April 2006 issue of Military Review.

FM 3-24: In an unusual, perhaps unprecedented step, the field manual was republished, in unedited form, by the University of Chicago Press, with separate forewords by General David Petraeus, General James Amos, and John Nagl, as well as an introduction by Sarah Sewall. US Army and Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual: US Army Field Manual No. 3-24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Chapter 12: Hearts & Minds

H. R. McMaster had made his mark: H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).

At the time of Desert Storm: Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 443ff; and interviews.

The regiment headed to Iraq in February: The story of McMaster at Tal Afar comes from George Packer, “The Lesson of Tal Afar,” New Yorker, April 10, 2006; Regimental After-Action Report, “The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Operation Iraqi Freedom III” (n.d., provided to author); Contemporary Operations Study Team, On Point III, “Interview with Colonel H. R. McMaster” (Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, KS), January 7, 2008; Major Jay B. Baker, “Tal Afar 2005: Laying the Counterinsurgency Groundwork,” Army, June 2009; Christopher J. Lamb and Evan Munsing, Secret Weapon: High-Value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, March 2011); and interviews.

“key strategic tasks”: Multi-National Forces-Iraq, Security Strategy, Counterinsurgency Center of Excellence, “Ilitzam Mushtarak—United Commitment,” November 5, 2005 (provided to author); and interviews.

If you have not studied counterinsurgency: The paper, “Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency,” was published in a number of places, including Small Wars Journal, April 2006, and Military Review, May–June 2006; backstory comes from interviews.

He emailed the draft: The like-minded friends are all listed in the author’s acknowledgments; and interviews.

The same week that Kilcullen: Packer, op. cit.; Cohen, Crane, Nagl, Horvath, op. cit.; Stephen T. Hosmer and Sibylle O. Crane, Counterinsurgency: A Symposium, April 16–20, 1962, R-412-1, RAND Corp. (1963), republished (April 2006); David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006 reissue).

“This strategy is shaped”: Multi-National Force Iraq Security Strategy, “Ilitzam Mushtarak—United Commitment,” July 1, 2006; and interviews.

Which made Rayburn all the more impassioned and insistent: Besides his many memos, which he circulated to other, more sympathetic officers once Abizaid clearly stopped reading them, Rayburn wrote an article pointedly comparing the emerging US drawdown strategy in Iraq to the British strategy in Mesopotamia in the 1920s, a similar sequence of an invasion followed by exhaustion and withdrawal, which led to the rise of the Wahhabi Muslims, whose descendants were now dominating the Iraqi insurgency. Joel Rayburn, “The Last Exit from Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, March–April 2006; and interviews.

On August 3 . . . Four months earlier, on April 4: Cloud and Jaffe, op. cit., 148–52, 157–60; and interviews.

It was published: Major General Peter W. Chiarelli and Major Patrick P. Michaelis, “Winning the Peace: The Requirements for Full-Spectrum Operations,” Military Review, July–Aug. 2005; backstory comes from interviews.

“Anytime you fight”: Cloud and Jaffe, 225–26, 236–37; and interviews.

Three months later, he joined: “Revolt of the Generals,” Time, April 16, 2006; Ricks, op. cit., 38.

in fact, it aroused anger: Fred Kaplan, “Challenging the Generals,” New York Times Magazine, August 26, 2007.

Chapter 13: “Clear, Hold, and Build”

More pertinent still, her dissertation: Steve Coll, “The General’s Dilemma,” New Yorker, December 8, 2008.

Afterward, they coauthored a book: Philip D. Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

“remains a failed state”: Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 388; and interviews.

When he came back from that trip: Ibid., 412–14; and interviews.

“clear and hold”: Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 7, 29. Sorley’s was one of a few books, published around this time, arguing that the United States could have won the Vietnam War with a bit more patience. That view is very controversial; few find it convincing (I don’t); but, more valuably, this was also one of the few books between the end of the war and John Nagl’s dissertation that described the Komer-Abrams strategy and contrasted it with Westmoreland’s clearly failed approach. For a cogent critique of Sorley, see H. D. S. Greenway, “The Revisionist Approach to Vietnam,” Boston Globe, February 19, 2008.

I have read that both: Memo, Donald Rumsfeld to Stephen J. Hadley, “Talk of a New DoD Strategy,” November 7, 2005.

Just over two weeks later, he was about to quote: Woodward, op. cit., 422.

“On that happy note . . . My apologies”: Memo, Donald Rumsfeld to General George Casey, “Comments in This Morning’s NSC,” May 26, 2006. The Rumsfeld Papers website, library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/3945/2006-05-30%20to%20 George%20Casey%20re%20Comments%20in%20This%20Mornings%20NSC.pdf. (The memo, as it appears in the Rumsfeld Papers, is stamped May 30, but a copy of the original, which was provided to author, is dated May 26.)

Bush scheduled a two-day meeting: Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 42–45; and interviews.

During the Camp David meeting: MNF-I, 2006 Joint Campaign Action Plan: “Unity, Security, Prosperity,” July 9, 2006; and interviews. Casey’s briefings, once Secret, have now been declassified. Joint Campaign Plan: Camp David Briefing; COIN Strategy: Camp David Briefing; and Strategic Assessment: Camp David Briefing, all dated June 12, 2006. Some of the material also came from Force Structure Assessment, June 21, 2006.

Now, face-to-face in Iraq: Woodward, The War Within, 3–7; and interviews.

Charts drawn up by Casey’s: MNF Iraq Update, July 19, 2006.

Chapter 14: “We Are Pulling in Different Directions”

And so the leaders of Congress: The Iraq Study Group’s roster of Republicans initially consisted of James Baker, former CIA director Robert Gates, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, former senator Alan Simpson, and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The Democrats were Lee Hamilton, former secretary of defense William Perry, former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, business executive (and erstwhile Bill Clinton adviser) Vernon Jordan, and former senator and governor Charles Robb. Early on, Giuliani quit, ostensibly because he was about to run for president but actually because he’d decided to spend the panel’s first month racking up $1.7 million in speaking fees to twenty different private groups. Gates resigned toward the end of the process, in November, after President Bush nominated him to replace Donald Rumsfeld as his secretary of defense. They were replaced by former attorney general Edwin Meese and former ambassador Lawrence Eagleburger, respectively.

All spring and into the summer: The schedule and number of experts and witnesses come from The Iraq Study Group Report (US Institute of Peace, December 6, 2006), Appendices.media.usip.org/reports/iraq_study_group_report.pdf.

“grave and deteriorating”: Ibid., 6, 11, 13, 23, 30, 57, 60.

“could conceivably worsen”: Ibid., 50.

On September 3: Cloud and Jaffe, op. cit., 238–39; and interviews.

“inadequate to the task”: R. W. Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Constraints on U.S.-G.V.N. Performance in Vietnam. RAND Corp., R-967-ARPA, August 1972, vi. Komer’s influence here comes from interviews.

“considerably different”: “Analysis of Iraqi and Coalition End States” [n.d., circa October 2006], provided to author; and interviews.

Chapter 15: The Field Manual

“After a thorough review”: Jerry V. Proctor, SES, Deputy Commandant, Futures, US Army Intelligence Center, Memorandum for Commander, Combined Arms Center, “Review of FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations,” June 14, 2006 (provided to author).

“all Soldiers and Marines are intelligence”: US Army, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency Operations (Final Draft—Not for Implementation), June 2006, esp. 3-1 [hereinafter called “FM 3-24, June draft”].

McFate had written one of the first: Montgomery McFate, “The Social Context of IEDs,” Military Review, May/June 2005.

“potential intelligence collectors”: US Army, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, December 2006, 3-1.

In mid-August, Schoomaker: Email, Conrad Crane to Montgomery McFate, Kyle Teamey, “The Battle over Chapter 3,” August 22, 2006. (This and all other emails noted were provided to author.) Crane notes in the email: “The CSA [chief of staff of the Army] came by to see us at Leavenworth last week, and told us to get the manual out as soon as possible. LTG [Lieutenant General] Petraeus is looking for a way to do that without completely antagonizing Huachuca.”

It took place on Tuesday, September 13: Email, Conrad Crane to LTC Lance McDaniel, Colonel Douglas King, “Intelligence changes to COIN FM,” September 14, 2006, refers to “our meeting in Alexandria yesterday . . . to do some reconciliation with some new doctrine . . . particularly dealing with HUMINT.” The substance of the discussion comes from interviews.

“dishonest and cowardly”: Ralph Peters, “Politically Correct War,” New York Post, October 18, 2006. The column was attached to a number of emails to and from Petraeus and others at Fort Leavenworth.

“a bit inexplicable”: Email, David Petraeus to Keith Nightingale, “Ralph Peters column today . . .,” October 20, 2006.

“to avoid overreacting”: Email, Conrad Crane to David Petraeus, John Nagl, “NY Times, 29 Oct 06,” October 29, 2006.

“If you can get past the cheap shots”: Email, David Petraeus to Conrad Crane, Clinton Ancker, October 27, 2006. (This was in response to an email from Conrad Crane, saying much the same thing as the October 29 email quoted above.)

“Not making drastic changes”: Email, David Petraeus to Conrad Crane, “Counter-insurgency Field Manual for the Senate,” November 3, 2006, 11:32 a.m.

“is the only one some people will read”: Email, Conrad Crane to David Petraeus, “Counterinsurgency Field Manual for the Senate,” November 3, 2006, 11:11 a.m.

“You are exactly right”: Email, David Petraeus to Conrad Crane, “Counterinsurgency Field Manual for the Senate,” November 3, 2006, 1:14 p.m.

“The more force used”: FM 3-24, June Draft, 1–26ff.

“Sometimes, the more force is used”: FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 1–26ff.

Petraeus had one of his aides: Email, Barry Periatt to Montgomery McFate, “FW: Ralph Peters column today . . .,” October 24, 2006. Major Periatt had replaced Jan Horvath as chief writer of Leavenworth’s doctrine office after Horvath was deployed to the COIN Academy in Iraq.

“true believers”: McFate’s paragraphs were incorporated in email, Clinton Ancker to David Petraeus, [no subject line], October 27, 2006.

Petraeus edited McFate’s remarks: They are in FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, 1–14ff.

“to eliminate as many causes”: Ibid., 1, 9.

“Speaking as a social scientist”: This exchange is quoted in Ralph Peters, “Learning to Lose,” American Interest, July/August 2007. Nagl confirms it in an interview and remains baffled as to why he can’t be both. Other tales about the lunch come from interviews.

“measured,” “minimal”: Email, Conrad Crane to David Petraeus, Steve Capps, “Measured Force,” November 24, 2006.

“Use the Appropriate Level of Force”: Email, David Petraeus to Steve Capps, Conrad Crane, “FM 3-24, ch. 1, showing changes,” November 27, 2006.

One-and-a-half-million: US Army, Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), introduction by John A. Nagl, xviii.

“the most-improved”: Ralph Peters, “Getting Counterinsurgency Right,” New York Post, December 20, 2006.

“theory-poisoned and indecisive”: Peters, “Learning to Lose,” op. cit.

In the same issue: David Petraeus, “Beyond the Cloister,” American Journal, July/ August 2007.

Chapter 16: The Surge

In mid-September David Petraeus: Some aspects of the “council of colonels” are reported in Bob Woodward, The War Within, 145–52ff., passim, and Thomas Ricks, The Gamble, 90, 96, 101–4; but most of the tale told here comes from interviews.

The seeds of the council had been planted: The story about Keane watching C-Span comes from Ricks, 80, 83–84; the rest, including all the material about Keane’s background, comes from interviews.

“I don’t know that there’s any guidebook”: Quoted in ibid., 84. Keane’s reaction and the chronicle of his background with the JRTC and COIN doctrine come from interviews.

when Petraeus was accidentally shot: Cloud and Jaffe, op. cit., 94–96.

“We are edging toward strategic failure”: Ricks, op. cit., 88–90; and interviews.

But in the end, the group concluded: The forty-seven-page study was published as F. W. Kagan, Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, January 5, 2007). General Keane briefed the study at a press conference on December 14, 2006, www.aei.org/events/2006/12/14/choosing-victory-a-plan-for-success-in-iraq-event. The story of how it came about, and how the analysts did their work, comes from interviews.

The White House meeting began around three thirty: Ricks, op. cit., 98–101; Woodward, op. cit., 279–82; and interviews.

Chapter 17: Awakenings

The reversal came to be called: The section on the Anbar Awakening is based on Major Niel Smith and Colonel Sean MacFarland, “Anbar Awakens: The Tipping Point,” Military Review, March–April, 2008; Smith and MacFarland, “Addendum: Anbar Awakens,” Military Review, May–June 2008; Michael J. Totten, “Anbar Awakens, Part I: The Battle of Ramadi,” Middle East Journal, September 10, 2007, www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001514.html; David Kilcullen, “Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt,” Small Wars Journal, August 29, 2007; and interviews. (The Devlin report is quoted in Ricks, op. cit., 47, 331–35.)

“speed up . . . move outside all major cities”: Reprinted in Ricks, op. cit., 337–41; and interviews.

“Closing the Gap”: There are a few versions of this briefing. The earliest, written in December 2006 and known as “the Gap slide,” was obtained by the author; a later one, from January 2007, incorporated into Odierno’s campaign plan, is reproduced in Ricks, op. cit., 344. The background comes from interviews.

The contest’s judges included: The names of the judges and the winners are cited in US Army Combined Arms Center, “2005–2006 Writing Contest Winners: Combined Arms Center Commanding General’s Special Topic Writing Competition: Countering Insurgencies,” babylonscovertwar.com/Analysis/Conventional Force_COIN.pdf; the background and the story of Ollivant and Chewning in Baghdad come from interviews.

“Doug, if this reaches you”: Email, Petraeus to Ollivant, January 8, 2007 (obtained by author).

“clear-control-retain”: Cited in MNC-I [Odierno] Campaign Plan, February 2007; and interviews.

The Coven’s intelligence analysis: Most of this section relies on interviews, although I was also provided with some of their briefing slides on the maps and the Baghdad Belts.

“chaos, violence, and fear . . . This . . . is where you”: General Raymond Odierno, MNC-I, “Counterinsurgency Guidance,” June 2007 (provided to author); backstory on the memo’s origins comes from interviews.

For the first half of 2007, the violence: Data come from briefings and charts assembled by MNC-I and US Central Command; the material on Phantom Thunder comes from those sources and from interviews.

Chapter 18: The Insurgent in the Pentagon

When he got back to the Pentagon: Some of this portrait of Gates comes from two articles I wrote about Gates at the time: Fred Kaplan, “The Professional,” New York Times Magazine, February 10, 2008; and Fred Kaplan, “The Transformer,” Foreign Policy, September–October 2010; the rest comes from interviews conducted since.

The first glaring sign: The article was Dana Priest and Anne Hull, “Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration at Army’s Top Medical Facility,” Washington Post, February 18, 2007.

By promoting Schwartz: I wrote about the cultural change in the Air Force in Fred Kaplan, “Attack of the Drones,” Newsweek, September 8, 2009; much else in this section comes from subsequent interviews.

He also read an article: The article was Paul Burka, “Agent of Change,” Texas Monthly, November 2006.

“continuing to strengthen”: Robert M. Gates, confirmation hearings, Senate Armed Services Committee, December 5, 2006.

“In the years following the Vietnam”: Robert Gates, speech before the Association of the United States Army, October 10, 2007. I wrote about the significance of the speech at the time, in Fred Kaplan, “Secretary Gates Declares War on the Army Brass,” Slate, October 12, 2007. The backstory on Scott and how the speech came to be written comes from interviews since.

Scott got the idea: Yingling gained notoriety for writing an article called “A Failure in Generalship” (Armed Forces Journal, May 2007), accusing the Army’s general officer corps of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence,” and “moral courage,” specifically for remaining silent while Bush and Rumsfeld sent “a nation to war with insufficient means,” adding, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” The article was widely circulated and reinforced the sense, shared by many junior officers, that their commanders were out of touch.

“the surest means the Army”: Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl and Lieutenant Colonel Paul L. Yingling, “New Rules for New Enemies,” Armed Forces Journal, October 2006.

Geren had read: I reported some of this bitterness on the part of junior officers in Fred Kaplan, “Challenging the Generals,” New York Times Magazine, August 26, 2007. Geren read that article and heard similar reports elsewhere. (All of the material about Geren and the promotion board comes from interviews.)

Among the forty colonels: I covered the unique promotion board at the time in Fred Kaplan, “Promoting Innovation,” Slate, November 21, 2007; Fred Kaplan, “Annual General Meeting,” Slate, August 4, 2008, although I didn’t have the full story until researching this book.

Chapter 19: “It Is Folly”

“indirect colonial rule”: Roberto J. Gonzalez, “Toward Mercenary Anthropology?” Anthropology Today, June 2007.

“a brutal war of occupation”: https://sites.google.com/site/concernedanthropologists.

“an unacceptable application”: www.aaanet.org/pdf/EB_Resolution_110807.pdf.

McFate rattled off several: Montgomery McFate, “Building Bridges or Burning Heretics?” Anthropology Today, June 2007. See also McFate and Steve Fondacaro, “Reflections on the Human Terrain System During the First 4 Years,” Prism, vol. 2, no. 4; Richard Shweder, “A True Culture War,” New York Times, October 27, 2007.

Kilcullen went further: David Kilcullen, “Ethics, Politics, and Non-State Warfare,” Anthropology Today, June 2007. In this reply to Gonzalez’s article, Kilcullen, besides defending the humanitarian aspects of his work in Iraq, countered that anthropologists held no unique wisdom for judging whether a particular war was itself legitimate. “Since support for government, in democracies, is expressed through the ballot box,” he wrote, “the proper course of citizens who disagree with the war (including anthropologists) is to say so, and to vote for anti-war candidates at election . . . Once war is declared, the job of officials is to execute it effectively and humanely in line with the policy of the government of the day or, if they cannot support that policy, to resign.” It is this view that Kilcullen would soon repudiate.

“measurable data”: Email, Kilcullen to Houtman and Gusterson, July 29, 2007 (provided to author); and interviews.

“I am very impressed”: Email, Houtman to Kilcullen, April 30, 2007 (provided to author). The sequence of Kilcullen’s evolution comes from interviews.

the “formulation of policy”: US Government Counterinsurgency Guide, January 2009, 36; and interviews. The backstory on the conference and the guide comes entirely from interviews.

“should not be taken lightly”: Ibid., 3.

“However great its know-how”: Ibid., 2.

“will almost always need to co-opt”: Ibid., 29.

It is folly: Ibid., 37. A condensed version of this thought (including the word “folly”) is also on pp. 3–4.

“Unfortunately, there will inevitably”: US Government Counterinsurgency Guide, 40. The original draft, which did not contain this passage, was provided to author.

“to bring about regime change”: Ibid., 43.

“The biggest fucking stupid idea”: Quoted in Spencer Ackerman, “A Counterinsurgency Guide for Politicos,” Washington Independent, July 28, 2008; background for the story comes from interviews.

The Huffington Post . . . picked up: “Rice Adviser: Iraq Invasion Was ‘F*cking Stupid,’” Huffington Post, July 28, 2008.

“did not seek to clear”: Dave Kilcullen, “My Views on Iraq,” Small Wars Journal, July 29, 2008.

Rice finally signed the guide: The signatures and date are in US Government Counterinsurgency Guide, opening page.

Chapter 20: COIN Versus CT

“I don’t oppose all wars”: He made the speech at an antiwar rally in Chicago on October 2, 2002, action.barackobama.com/page/share/2002iraqfull.

Soon after he won the November 2008 election: Woodward, Obama’s Wars, 33. The material on Riedel comes from interviews.

On March 12: The date comes from Woodward, ibid., 112; the account of the meeting comes from interviews.

“The circumstances under which”: I was the journalist, reporting for the New York Times Magazine. Much of the material in this section about Gates comes from that profile (“The Professional,” op. cit.) and another one I wrote, later, for Foreign Policy (“The Transformer,” op. cit.). Much also comes from subsequent interviews.

“covert action”: I was the journalist here, too, interviewing him for Foreign Policy. Kaplan, “The Transformer,” op. cit.

“deeply skeptical”: Testimony, Robert M. Gates, Senate Armed Services Committee, January 27, 2009; see also Fred Kaplan, “What Are We Doing in Afghanistan?” Slate, February 5, 2009.

You could pay twenty Afghan: When Obama learned a few months later that the Taliban were luring Afghan soldiers by paying them more, he doubled the latter’s pay (the United States was financing the Afghan army’s payroll). Even then, the cost-ratio between an American and Afghan soldier would be an enormous 10:1.

“will take the fight”: Press conference, President Barack Obama, March 27, 2009.

“fresh thinking”: Press conference, Robert M. Gates, May 11, 2009.

In September 2003, Donald Rumsfeld signed: Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2011), 236.

By fusing all this intelligence: Ibid., esp. ch. 11; Spencer Ackerman, “How Special Ops Copied al-Qaida to Kill It,” Wired (Danger Room blog), September 9, 2011; Sean Naylor, “3-Star to Lead JSOC: Report Suggests Renewed Focus on Spec Ops,” Army Times, February 27, 2006.

A top-secret detention center: Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall, “Task Force 6-26: In Secret Unit’s ‘Black Room,’ a Grim Portrait of US Abuse,” New York Times, March 19, 2006.

“This is how we lose”: Ackerman, op. cit.

“No Blood, No Foul”: Schmitt and Marshall, op. cit.

The questions he asked the “assessment team”: The questions are recited on the opening pages of the report. Headquarters, International Security Assistance Force, “COMISAF Commander’s Initial Assessment,” August 30, 2009, i. A leaked copy was reprinted in full in the Washington Post’s online edition, September 21, 2009, media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/Assessment_Redacted _092109.pdf.

Among them were Fred Kagan: The full list is in Laura Rozen, “Winning Hearts and Minds: All of McChrystal’s Advisors,” Foreign Policy (The Cable blog), July 31, 2009. The near-appointment of Nagl and the substance of the deliberations come from interviews.

“The overall situation is deteriorating”: “COMISAF Commander’s Initial Assessment,” op. cit., 1-1.

“shape / clear / hold”: Ibid., A-2.

“better understanding”: Ibid., 1-2.

“a condition where the insurgency”: Ibid., 2-2.

“Progress is hindered”: Ibid., 1-2.

“the weakness of state”: Ibid., 2-4.

“have given Afghans little reason”: Ibid., 2-2.

“must protect the people”: Ibid., 1-2.

“by, with, and through”: Ibid., 2-4.

“conventional force . . . poorly”: Ibid., 1-2; cf. also 2-11.

“under-resourced”: Ibid., 1-3, 2-20.

One in particular caught his attention: Gates told me of Kagan’s influence; see Kaplan, “The Transformer,” op. cit. The article in question was Frederick W. Kagan, “We’re Not the Soviets in Afghanistan: And 2009 Isn’t 1979,” Weekly Standard (The Blog), August 21, 2009.

He’d honed this craft during his time as deputy: Scowcroft told me this, and Gates confirmed it, in my interviews for the New York Times Magazine profile. Kaplan, “The Professional,” op. cit.

That summer, he’d invited: Kenneth T. Walsh, “Obama’s Secret Dinner with Presidential Historians,” U.S. News & World Report, July 15, 2009; Peter Baker, “Could Afghanistan Become Obama’s Vietnam?” New York Times (Week in Review), August 22, 2009.

The specter of Vietnam haunted: Peter Spiegel and Jonathan Weisman, “Behind Afghan War Debate, a Battle of Two Books,” Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2009; George Packer, “What Obama and the Generals Are Reading,” New Yorker (“Interesting Times” blog), October 8, 2009. Soon after these articles appeared, the two authors wrote dueling op-ed pieces in the New York Times: Lewis Sorley, “The Vietnam War We Ignore,” and Gordon M. Goldstein, “From Defeat, Lessons in Victory,” both in the October 17, 2009, edition. The Vietnam parallels were further pursued in a piece that Goldstein cowrote with Bob Woodward, “The Anguish of Decision,” Washington Post, October 18, 2009.

McChrystal had listed a range of options: Woodward, Obama’s Wars, 192; Jonathan Alter, The Promise: President Obama, Year One (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), esp. ch. 21; and interviews.

The vice chairman of the JCS: Woodward, ibid., 235–36; Peter Bergen, Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad (New York: Crown, 2012), 173; and interviews.

“President Karzai . . . is not an adequate”: Cable, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry to Secretary Hillary Clinton, US Department of State, “COIN Strategy: Civilian Concerns,” November 9, 2009. There were two cables, sent on the same date; the second was much shorter and consisted of a few recommendations. Stories about the cables appeared in several papers within a few days. The full documents were reprinted in the New York Times’s online edition of January 25, 2010, to accompany an article by Eric Schmitt, “US Envoy’s Cables Show Worries on Afghan Plans.” See http://documents.nytimes.com/eikenberry-s-memos-on-the-strategy-in-afghanistan#p=1.

Petraeus and Mullen had testified: Admiral Mike Mullen, hearings, Senate Armed Services Committee, September 15, 2009.

Western inspectors calculated: Jon Boone and Ed Pilkington, “Fired UN Envoy Claims Third of Hamid Karzai Votes Fraudulent,” Guardian, October 4, 2009; Peter Galbraith, “How the Afghan Election Was Rigged,” Time, October 19, 2009 (Galbraith was another one of the monitors); “Focus on Karzai Following Afghan Election Fraud Report,” Voice of America, October 20, 2009; Fred Kaplan, “Karzai Salesman,” Slate, October 21, 2009. The “300 cups of tea” line is quoted in Fred Kaplan, “McChrystal: Gone and Soon Forgotten,” Slate, June 23, 2010.

“not fully resourced counterinsurgency”: Obama’s order on Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, dated November 29, 2009, is reprinted in full in Woodward, Obama’s Wars, 385–90; that it corresponded with what Obama told the advisers, and other details of the meeting, come from interviews.

So he asked them, one at a time: Alter, op. cit., 390; and interviews.

Petraeus was asked afterward: Woodward, op. cit., 338; and interviews.

Chapter 21: “Storm Clouds”

It was headed up by a three-star: The sections about Barno’s command in Afghanistan and about Eikenberry’s follow-up tour come mainly from interviews, but also from Christopher Koontz, ed., Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the US Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 2008), especially chs. 1–3.

Led by Louis Hughes: Ibid.; Beth Cole DeGrasse and Christina Parajon, “The Afghanistan Reconstruction Group: An Experiment with Future Potential,” USIPeace Brief, September 2006, www.usip.org/publications/afghanistan-reconstruction-group-experiment-future-potential; and interviews.

All in all, the NATO allies issued eighty-three: Colonel Douglas V. Mastriano, Faust and the Padshah Sphinx: Reshaping the NATO Alliance to Win in Afghanistan (Carlisle, PA: Army War College, 2010); Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, Mobilizing NATO for Afghanistan and Pakistan: An Assessment of Alliance Capabilities, Washington, DC, 2010; “ ‘Caveats’ Neuter NATO Allies,” Washington Times, July 15, 2006; and interviews.

“An operation that kills five”: US Army, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, 1-25.

“for the support and will”: HQ, International Security Assistance Force, Kabul, Afghanistan, “Tactical Directive.” The classified document was issued on July 1, 2009; unclassified excerpts were released July 6. www.nato.int/isaf/docu/official_texts/Tactical_Directive_090706.pdf.

“Protecting the people is the mission”: HQ, ISAF, Kabul, “ISAF Commander’s Counterinsurgency Guidance.” www.nato.int/isaf/docu/official_texts/counterinsurgency_guidance.pdf. The document is undated; a historian at US Central Command told me it was issued on August 26, 2009.

Sewall began work in November: The section on Sarah Sewall’s CIVCAS study comes entirely from interviews. As far as I know, the only published mention of it is Colonel Tim Ryan, “Chairman’s Joint Lessons Learned Program,” JCAO Forum (vol. 1, no. 2, Winter 2012), a publication of the Joint and Coalition Operation Analysis, a division of the Joint Staff J7 deputy directorate for joint and coalition warfighting; but it’s wrong on most of the details.

“We’ve got a government in a box”: Dexter Filkins, “Afghan Offensive Is New War Model,” New York Times, February 12, 2010.

forty-eight “focus districts” . . . eighty “key terrain districts”: These figures are cited in US Department of Defense, Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan, April 2010; the rest of this section comes from interviews.

Two days before the offensive began: Dexter Filkins, “Afghans Try to Reassure Tribal Elders on Offensive,” New York Times, February 11, 2010.

McChrystal’s staff figured that Marja: Dianna Cahn, “Months After Marjah Offensive, Success Still Elusive,” Stars and Stripes, July 10, 2010; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “ ‘Still a Long Way to Go’ for US Operation in Marja, Afghanistan,” Washington Post, June 10, 2010; Carlotta Gall, “US Gains Evaporate, Taliban Go on Offensive,” New York Times, May 17, 2010. There’s also a very good, grim HBO documentary, The Battle for Marjah, directed by Ben Anderson.

They brought together 160: This section relies mainly on interviews, but also on Colonel Randy George and Dante Paradiso, “The Case for a Wartime Chief Executive Officer: Fixing the Interagency Quagmire in Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs, June 21, 2011, and on a longer, unpublished version of the article, “The Interagency Scrum in Afghanistan: Time for Unity of Command,” provided by the authors.

from “attacking the enemy in remote areas”: CJTF-82, 4 IBCT, 4th Infantry Division, “Towards the Tipping Point: The Separate, Connect, Transform (SCT) Strategy in N2KL,” July 22, 2009 (provided to author); and interviews.

One week after the signing: The story was Dexter Filkins, “Afghan Tribe, Vowing to Fight Taliban, to Get US Aid in Return,” New York Times, January 27, 2010.

“This is classic counterinsurgency”: CNN, interview with Hillary Clinton, January 28, 2010.

“we must focus on”: Quoted in Woodward, Obama’s Wars, 386.

“really stirred things up”: Joshua Partlow and Greg Jaffe, “US’s Good Intentions Go Awry in Afghan Tribal Area,” Washington Post, May 15, 2010.

A few days later, McChrystal and his staff: The article was Michael Hastings, “The Runaway General,” Rolling Stone, July 8–22, 2010. It was posted on the magazine’s website June 22 (the White House obtained an advance copy), and it appeared on newsstands June 25.

President Obama obtained: Mark Landler, “Short, Tense Deliberation, Then a General Is Gone,” New York Times, June 23, 2010.

Two years earlier, Biddle had written: The article was Stephen Biddle, “The New US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis,” Perspectives on Politics, June 2008.

Through a mix of cajoling: Spencer Ackerman, “Petraeus’ First Big Afghanistan Gamble: Militias Local Cops,” Wired (Danger Room blog), July 14, 2010; and interviews.

“the ideal situation”: Galula, op. cit., 25. Galula even drew a sketch of what an ideal country for insurgents would look like; it’s almost exactly the shape of Afghanistan.

“secure and serve the population”: Unclassified portions of Petraeus’s “Tactical Directive” were quoted in HQ, ISAF, press release, “General Petraeus Issues Updated Tactical Directive; Emphasizes ‘Disciplined Use of Force,’” August 4, 2010, www.isaf.nato.int/article/isaf-releases/general-petraeus-issues-updated-tactical-directive-emphasizes-disciplined-use-of-force.html. The full “COIN Guidance” was issued as HQ, ISAF, Kabul, Afghanistan, “COMISAF’s Counterinsurgency Guidance,” August 1, 2010.

In his first three months: US Air Forces Central Combined Air and Space Operations Center, “Combined Forces Air Component Commander, 2007–2010 Air Power Statistics” (as of September 30, 2010), www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2010/10/30-September-2010-Airpower-Stats.pdf.

killing or capturing three hundred midlevel Taliban leaders: Fred Kaplan, “A New Plan for Afghanistan: Less Counterinsurgency, More Killing and Capturing,” Slate, October 13, 2010; I got these numbers from an ISAF official at the time.

in late 2002, Rothstein had written: Seymour M. Hersh, “The Other War: Why Bush’s Afghanistan Problem Won’t Go Away,” New Yorker, April 12, 2004; the rest of the section on Rothstein comes from my interviews.

“I have three main enemies”: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “As US Assesses Afghan War, Karzai a Question Mark,” Washington Post, December 13, 2010.

But a few weeks later: Joshua Partlow, “Karzai Wants US to Reduce Military Operations in Afghanistan,” Washington Post, November 14, 2010.

“Your president has put me in an untenable position”: Part of this quote and story comes from Joshua Partlow and Karen DeYoung, “Petraeus Warns Afghans About Karzai’s Criticism of US War Strategy,” Washington Post, November 15, 2010; part comes from my interviews.

At Petraeus’s urging, and with President Obama’s: In his first three years as president, Barack Obama launched nearly six times as many drone strikes on Pakistan as George W. Bush did in the previous five years (241 from 2009–11 compared to 42 from 2004–08). Casualties are harder to determine, but the most authoritative unclassified estimate puts the number at between 2,400 and 3,000, of whom 80 percent were militants. New America Foundation, Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, The Year of the Drone: An Analysis of US Drone Strikes in Pakistan, 2004–2012, http://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/drones.

But despite an impressive hit rate: As late as January 2012, Ryan Crocker, US ambassador to Afghanistan, sent a top secret cable to the CIA, concluding that the persistence of enemy havens in Pakistan was jeopardizing the US war strategy. (Greg Jaffe and Greg Miller, “Secret U.S. Cable Warned About Pakistani Havens,” Washington Post, February 24, 2012.)

The tale of Pakistan’s role in the American adventure in Afghanistan is worthy of its own book. Pakistan’s leaders have, at best, an ambivalent view of the Islamist militants in their midst. On the one hand, they regard al Qaeda insurgents as a threat to their own rule; on the other hand, many officers in the military’s intelligence service have alliances with some militant groups, a relationship that was forged at Pakistan’s very birth as a nation in 1947. See Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005).

As for the Taliban on the Afghan border, Pakistan’s military has fought some groups but protected others. Pakistan’s officials uniformly see the bigger threat as India and are thus reluctant to place too many troops on the western border with Afghanistan, lest they leave themselves too exposed to India to the east. For the same reason, the Pakistanis have an interest in establishing a presence in Afghanistan—to secure a “defense in depth” against a possible invasion from India and, more immediately, to counter the economic foothold that India has established in Afghanistan in recent years—and they do this through not-so-covert sponsorship of the Haqqani network, one of the more militant of the insurgencies. To the extent the Pakistanis desire peace in Afghanistan, they want it only on their terms through their agents. In early 2010, the Pakistani government boasted of capturing two dozen Taliban leaders; but a few months later, US intelligence discovered that those specific leaders had been trying to set up peace talks—their sin being that they hadn’t done so through Pakistan. On this, see Dexter Filkins, “Pakistanis Tell of Motive in Taliban Leader’s Arrest,” New York Times, August 22, 2010.

From the outset of his presidency, Obama was well aware of the conflict’s regional dimension and appointed veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke as his AfPak envoy. The two men were temperamentally very different—Obama cool, Holbrooke melodramatic—but this was one of the few personnel bones that the president threw to Hillary Clinton, who’d been a friend of Holbrooke’s for years. (Had she won the 2008 presidential election, he almost certainly would have been her secretary of state.) At his first meeting with Karzai, Holbrooke launched into a screaming tirade, which may have worked with the likes of Slobodan Milosevic (in Bill Clinton’s administration, Holbrooke had negotiated the Dayton Accords, which removed the Serbian dictator from power), but not with Karzai. The Afghan president refused to meet with him again. Holbrooke focused more on rallying the US civilian bureaucracy to the cause of Afghanistan, with uneven results. He died on December 13, 2010, and was replaced with Marc Grossman, a veteran diplomat of a lower key. Still, little progress was made. One limitation from the outset was that India’s leaders refused to negotiate in any forum that regarded their country as one of three points in a triangle.

McMaster linked up with the intelligence: US Army, Center for Army Lessons Learned, Fort Leavenworth, interview with H. R. McMaster, Commander, CJIATF-Shafafkyat, HQ ISAF, Kabul, January 27, 2012; and interviews.

His efforts resulted: Matthew Rosenberg and Graham Bowley, “Intractable Graft Hampering US Strategy,” New York Times, March 7, 2012; Dexter Filkins, “The Afghan Bank Heist,” New Yorker, February 14, 2011; and interviews.

A few nights before his farewell ceremony: The guests were John M. Barry, Newsweek’s military correspondent, who was writing a profile of Petraeus, and Paula Broadwell, a former West Point cadet who was writing a hagiographical book about the general. The description comes from John Barry, “Petraeus’ Next Battle,” Newsweek, July 17, 2011, and from additional details provided to me by Barry.

Chapter 22: “A New American Way of War”

He’d learned back in December 2010: The date comes from Paula Broadwell, All In: The Education of David Petraeus (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), although the author doesn’t report, or even speculate, why Petraeus didn’t get the chairman-ship.

The eight-page document: US Defense Department, “Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” January 2012, www.defense.gov/news/Defense_Strategic_Guidance.pdf.

“As we look beyond the wars”: President Obama, press conference, January 5, 2012.

“conduct large-scale”: See ch. 6.

They include nine lieutenants: The numbers are from Rick Hampson, “At West Point, a Quiet Place to Honor Warriors,” USA Today, January 4, 2012; all other material in this section comes from interviews.

The most often-cited models: Examples of successful noncolonial counterinsurgency campaigns launched by outside powers, especially in the post-WWII era, are rare. See Erin Marie Simpson, The Perils of Third-Party Counterinsurgency Campaigns, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, June 2010.

The successful COIN campaigns: On Malaya, see Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 75; on the Philippines, see Max Boot, Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 125.

“Vietnam was an extremely painful”: David Howell Petraeus, The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam, PhD dissertation, Princeton, October 1987. He excerpted this section of the thesis in an article, “Lessons of History and Lessons of Vietnam,” in the Autumn 1986 issue of Parameters.