The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army (Jaffe, Greg; Cloud, David)
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
Jaffe, Greg, and Cloud, David. The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army. Crown/Archetype, 2009.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Chapter Two - Abizaidland
was amazed that a few dozen British officers oversaw the wide-ranging effort—fighting insurgents, overseeing aid projects, and advising the sultan’s government. Abizaid envied
Chapter Three - The New Centurions
President,” he said when it was his turn to speak, “basically what we have is a hollow Army.” It was an Army that couldn’t fight, and not just in the Middle East.
But he also came to understand the debilitating effect a long and unsuccessful occupation has on an army, even one as disciplined as the Israel Defense Forces.
“Moderates in Amal, unable to deliver on promises to force an Israeli withdrawal, lost ground to more radical Shia,” Abizaid recounted. In that way, occupation of the security zone “actually worked contrary to the long-term interests of Israel by weakening the forces of moderation in southern Lebanon to the benefit of the radicals dedicated to the destruction
The heavy-handed Israeli presence was radicalizing Shiites, strengthening Iran and Hezbollah. It wasn’t making anyone more secure.
Chapter Four - The Department
Krepinevich, by contrast, insisted that the Army had lost in Vietnam not because of meddling civilians but because of its own incompetence. Its search-and-destroy tactics had alienated the very people it was supposed to be protecting. “The Army ended up trying to fight the kind of conventional war that it was trained, organized and prepared (and that it wanted) to fight instead of the counterinsurgency war that it was sent to fight,” he argued.
“Large unit tactics do not appear to have been appropriate for what was primarily a political war and an insurgency,”
After returning to West Point, Petraeus finished his dissertation, writing a prescient final chapter that criticized the Pentagon view that the U.S. military should only be committed to wars in which it could use overwhelming force to achieve clear objectives. This preference for short, firepower-intensive battles would soon be dubbed the Powell Doctrine, named for its most prominent adherent, General Colin Powell. Such an all-or-nothing approach to war was “unrealistic,” chided Petraeus, who had never been in combat. The Army might prefer only rapid, conventional wars with broad popular support. But sooner or later it would be sent by the country’s political leaders into a protracted conflict in which its foes would try to blend in with the populace, as the Viet Cong had done. In this environment, he argued, the United States would have to limit its use of firepower and try to win over the population
Chapter Six - No Job for Amateurs
They returned home certain that Iraq could not withstand the awesome might of the American military. Abizaid in many ways drew the opposite conclusion.
Sooner or later, though, an occupying army, even one with the purest of motives, would find itself hated and attacked.
During their four months in Iraq, Abizaid and his troops lived in crumbling buildings without electricity or running water and washed in streams and lakes. Without firing a shot, they slowly pushed the Iraqis south. They blasted them with loud music, buzzed their living quarters at 2: 00 a.m. with Apache helicopters, and fired illumination rounds—artillery shells that light up the night sky—at their positions. As a final resort, they blocked mountain passes to prevent Baghdad from ferrying in reinforcements.
“Why do you torture everybody?” he asked. “Why not just kill them?” “Nobody fears death,”
Many military officers blamed Clinton for the disaster, insisting that it was a mistake to commit the U.S. military to such ill-defined and unwinnable missions.
The military’s instinct—to go in big and get out fast—was not acceptable.
“We must recognize that peacekeeping is no job for amateurs,”
Abizaid believed deeply that the military didn’t get to choose the kinds of wars that it would fight, and that it was likely the Clinton administration or its successors would send U.S. troops on similar peacekeeping missions in the future, probably without fully thinking through what they were taking on.
Several put together a list of soldier slang terms and gave it to their new boss so that he would come off better when addressing his troops.
Every Rakkasan was required to fasten the top button of his combat fatigues, the one right under the chin, ostensibly so uncamouflaged necks wouldn’t show. Some U.S. soldiers in the 101st thought all that Petraeus’s “battle button” did was make them look stupid. Actually, that was his intention. “It made others joke about us, which pulled us together,” Petraeus later explained.
In both places, the U.S. military’s plan assumed that civilians from the UN or other entities could quickly restore a working government, electricity, and other essential services. It was a wildly optimistic assumption.
He believed that he was creating a blueprint for a new kind of military operation, and he wanted his peers to know it. Shortly after returning home, Petraeus and Killebrew penned a military journal article that was triumphantly titled “Winning the Peace.”
began referring to them as “peace operations,” and later, when that came to seem too narrow, as “military operations other than war,” or MOOTW (pronounced “mootwah”).
Though these jobs required new skills, the Army and the Marines did very little to prepare for them. Too much time spent on peacekeeping would dull the Army’s combat edge, generals reasoned. The conventionally trained military could always adjust on the fly. It was an idea Abizaid and Petraeus explicitly rejected.
Abizaid trusted his sergeants to check such details. He was loose, funny, and even a bit sarcastic. Soldiers who wandered into his office were always struck that his desk and file cabinets were virtually empty. He seemed to run the entire 3,000-soldier brigade out of the notebook stuffed in his cargo pants. Petraeus, meanwhile, maintained binders full of rules and regulations. There was even a rule for labeling the binders, complained his officers, who were accustomed to Abizaid’s more laid-back approach.
force was gigantic, with 20,000 U.S. troops and 40,000 more soldiers from European countries, including Russia.
In theory the job of forging Bosnia into a functioning, multiethnic state was supposed to be handled by the UN-led civilian administration and the Bosnians themselves. As in Haiti, the civilians were quickly overwhelmed, and there was pressure on the military to expand its role—to fill the massive civilian gaps, to arrest war criminals, and to protect refugees who wanted to return home.
Abizaid was a different kind of officer who sought answers to problems that most officers didn’t see.
broad outlines of a deal that would place the Russian peacekeepers under NATO control but also salvage some measure of Russian pride.
Clark was an activist general who was comfortable using military power to prevent humanitarian disasters and stabilize failing states.
Although Clark had the backing of the White House and the State Department on many of his initiatives in Kosovo, he had alienated his most important boss: the defense secretary.
Chapter Seven - Sheikh of Sheikhs
Both Abizaid and Petraeus had heard such promises about civilians taking over the postwar reconstruction from the military in the 1990s. And both expected that, just as in the nineties, the military would have to fill the void when the civilian teams were overwhelmed by the chaos that followed combat.
two lessons from Israel’s failure: occupation duty is hard even for the best-trained military, and the longer you stay the harder it gets.
“Senior-level Baathists with money will flee the country. They will become a problem for Interpol,” he predicted. “Senior Baathists without money will be killed or will turn themselves in to us and try to trade information for clemency. Then there are the middle and lower tiers that run the country. We want them to come back to their jobs and work with us.” It was these party members, the roughly 30,000 to 50,000 bureaucrats, teachers, police
From Washington, Feith cut Abizaid off. “The policy of the United States government is de-Baathification,”
He set up a temporary command post in the airport terminal and began to scratch out the closest thing that anyone had to a postwar plan. He didn’t know anything about Mosul. The division didn’t even have maps of the area. He was working mostly on instincts honed during his years in Haiti and a tour in Bosnia. At a minimum he decided that he needed money to pay civil service workers, buy police uniforms,
few weeks later the Bush administration barred further elections in the country out of fear that fundamentalists, who were organizing through the mosques, would win.
Bremer arrived with two orders—both hatched in the Pentagon—that upended Abizaid and Petraeus’s plans. The first was a sweeping de-Baathification edict that banned as many as 50,000 former Baath party members from ever serving in government. A second decree disbanded the army.
lot of those guys were wearing military uniforms a few months ago. They don’t see us as their liberators or their friends.” Instead of the 101st Airborne acting as an all-powerful occupation force, what were needed were Muslim troops who could patrol alongside American soldiers and blunt the extremists’ message that the troops were anti-Islam, Abizaid insisted.
He was convinced that Bremer didn’t want the Turks or any other Muslim forces because they’d complicate the Bush administration’s plans to remake Iraq—plans he thought were unrealistic.
“The whole idea was they wanted control. The policy makers wanted control through American forces.”
Rumsfeld opined that the Afghan warlords might send forces to Iraq. Sending ill-disciplined Afghans, scarred by decades of civil war, to a country in the midst of its own ethno-sectarian conflict was the worst idea Abizaid could imagine. The ignorance about the region back in Washington could be astounding.
Driving through Cairo, Abizaid pointed out the large number of Egyptian soldiers standing guard on the sooty streets. In the Arab world, big armies kept young men out of trouble and held fractious societies together.
“You have to address the honor of the tribes. Pay the families when you kill one of their men; pay the sheikhs,”
He believed that as time passed, Iraqi resentment over the occupation would grow and the effectiveness of the military would be diminished.
But Abizaid underestimated the role that aggressive commanders such as Petraeus were playing in stabilizing the fractious country, at least temporarily. Without Saddam and his henchmen around anymore, only the U.S. military had the capacity to fill the vacuum.
am not saying that all these people should be kept, but if you are going to tell people that they’re never going to work again, you might as well throw them in jail.” “At least they can eat there,” a less-than-sympathetic Chalabi replied.
Most in the crowd had fought in Iraq’s bloody war with Iran during the 1980s. They felt as though they had served their country bravely. Now they were standing in the rain begging forgiveness for sins they didn’t believe they had committed.
Although he didn’t realize it, Petraeus was holding Mosul together with the force of his personality and his 22,000 troops. Neither was sustainable over the long term.
Chapter Eight - “We Didn’t Know”
Before leaving Fort Hood in Texas, he had drilled into the nearly 20,000 soldiers under his command that their primary mission would be not fighting but improving daily life for ordinary Iraqis. He sent his officers to the Texas capital, Austin, to spend several days observing a big city’s sewage, trash collection, and power systems. He flew them to London for briefings on the British counterinsurgency operations in Northern Ireland, and later to Jordan for a weeklong course on Arab society and culture.
the division commander, he had millions of dollars at his disposal but was limited, in most cases, to expending no more than $ 10,000 at a time. To do what he had in mind, he needed help from USAID, which had more money, as well as expertise in writing big contracts and planning construction projects.
approved $ 18.6 billion the previous fall to help rebuild Iraq’s shattered infrastructure, and Stephenson’s portion of that was more than $ 2 billion. But most of that money had already been earmarked for just one company, Bechtel Corporation, which had won contracts to do a few large projects that would take years to finish. The projects were generating few jobs for average Iraqis and would do little anytime soon to change the crushing realities of life in Baghdad.
“We had accomplished the seemingly impossible task of uniting everybody in the country against us,” recalled
The most important battle was not over who would control the streets; it was over who would win the allegiance of the people living there.
Bush administration told the CPA that it had three weeks to put together a plan to spend $ 18.4 billion in reconstruction money. Short on time, the CPA funneled most of the money into a small number of expensive infrastructure projects.
He suggested using the money that had been set aside for mammoth infrastructure projects to lay cheap sewage pipe, repair pumps, buy generators, and rehabilitate electrical substations. At least those kinds of projects would make life more bearable, and they could be done with local contractors, which would create jobs for Iraqis.
In Baghdad, he headed the Office of Transition Initiatives, a small arm of USAID whose mission was to do quick projects. In forty-eight hours he could write a contract for millions of dollars and, working with a cell phone and a list of contacts, put more than a thousand men to work. It was just what Chiarelli had in mind.
Not only would his division fight the insurgency, it would control the reconstruction budget, an approach that had been tried in the latter years of Vietnam. General Creighton Abrams had dubbed it the “one war” strategy.
Chapter Nine - All Glory Is Fleeting
The two missions had much in common. But in the Balkans the military had pressed the Clinton administration to ensure that its aims in the war-torn country were limited. Its job was to enforce a peace agreement between warring parties. In Iraq the task was far tougher. The military was essentially being asked to rebuild a society and defeat a ruthless armed resistance.
The massive base violated just about every rule of counterinsurgency strategy, which preaches the importance of small groups of soldiers living among the people and providing security. But the Army didn’t know much about counterinsurgency when it built Victory Base Complex in 2003. It built what it knew.
the war was very different from the peacekeeping missions that Casey had overseen in the 1990s. “We don’t understand the fight we’re in,” he warned his new boss.
The Army was proceeding on the assumption that it could be in Iraq another three years, until early 2007, he said in an answer that he had prepared ahead of time, but he stressed that was only an estimate, not a prediction. There was no real way of knowing how much longer the war would last.
But there was one parting order he did want to pass along: to resist the temptation to do too much. Military officers thought they could fix everything, Rumsfeld warned, and the more the United States tried to do for the Iraqis, the less they would do for themselves and the longer U.S. forces would be stuck there.
some parts of the Army had vowed never to refight Vietnam, so too had the president. But Bush took his own maxim to the extreme, leaving his commanders without any real instructions except for the advice they got from Rumsfeld. While the president was insisting that the United States was in a life-or-death struggle to change the Middle East, Rumsfeld was essentially telling his top commander that he shouldn’t try too hard.
Classic counterinsurgency theory held that to defeat insurgents, military forces had to win the trust and support of the people. “I came at it a little differently,” Casey recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, it’s the people, but the way we’re going to get to the people is through a legitimate Iraqi government.’”
The assumption that fair elections would blunt the insurgency was widely held among senior U.S. officials at the time. Unfortunately, it was completely wrong.
He found himself drawn to one scene in which Lawrence emerges from his tent to find that his Arab allies, whom he had been fighting with for months, are gone. They’d gone to visit their families, leaving him alone in the desert. “That just resonated with me,” Petraeus recalled.
He believed that a commander should never express doubt in front of his troops. “You might put your head down privately somewhere, but then when the door opens you’ve got to show determination and total commitment. You’ve got to be unyielding,” Petraeus often said. But his slumped shoulders and bloodshot eyes betrayed him.
They were three of the most experienced generals in the Army, solid professionals and dedicated soldiers. He knew the Middle East and what it took to bring stability to its fractured societies. Petraeus had probably thought and studied more about counterinsurgency than anyone. Casey knew the Army and its capabilities like few other officers.
“Between the three of us we need to figure this out in a nonaccusatory manner,” Abizaid said. “We are missing something philosophically. This is the only war we have got. We have to win it.”
year and a half after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis were still unwilling or unable to fight for their own country. Ninety-five U.S. troops had been killed and 560 wounded in the battle. By contrast, only eleven Iraqi soldiers died in the fighting
In a weird paradox, the more American troops fought to stabilize the country, the more resentment they generated among ordinary Iraqis, frustrated
Every six months Casey got an assessment of military operations in Iraq. He usually asked one of the British generals to write it, believing that a foreign officer would be more willing to give him the honest assessment he needed.
“initiatives group,” a small team that was supposed to come up with unconventional ideas for the commander.
advised Casey to go to the briefing early one day and ask people what they were reading. If it didn’t have something to do with Iraq or Arab culture, Casey should tell them to read something that did.
Abu Ghraib, a Sunni enclave
Chapter Ten - The Bunker in Jadiriyah
Casey was under pressure from Rumsfeld to cut forces, but some of the pressure was also self-generated. He firmly believed that the longer the United States stayed in Iraq, the longer radical groups such as Al Qaeda would pick away at its forces. Sooner or later the attacks would exhaust the patience of the American people. The only way to win was to pare back troop levels and make the Iraqis do more. Casey knew that his subordinate commanders, including Petraeus, weren’t going to volunteer to get by with fewer soldiers.
contrasted the U.S. defeat in Vietnam with the British victory in Malaya in the 1950s against another Communist insurgency. The difference, Nagl argued, was that the British generals saw the folly of using massive force against guerrillas who were often indistinguishable from ordinary villagers. Instead they focused on building local governments, training security forces, and protecting the civilians.
desperately short of interpreters.
“Beware of the majors of Desert Storm,” he often said. These were officers who had fought in the 1991 tank battle and refused to believe there was any other type of war. It was the Army equivalent of “Don’t trust anybody over thirty.”
reluctance to ask for additional troops grew out of the Army’s can-do culture. “It’s our nature to get the job done with what we have,” he said. “And I was up against that all the time.”
the United States was not fully committed to winning. “We’re managing this war, not fighting it,”
checklist of counterinsurgency best practices developed by Sepp. Successful armies isolated the civilian population from the enemy by providing security, stable government, a strong police force, and decent jobs. They built sophisticated intelligence networks, used the minimum amount of force necessary in raids, and offered amnesty and rehabilitation to former insurgents.
If Casey wanted to fix the foundering war effort, he had to expand beyond training Iraqi troops and take on political and economic development in the country. Technically, the U.S. embassy was responsible for these areas. But the embassy was sorely lacking in money and manpower. Smart commanders tried to fill the gap, but they didn’t have the expertise to build local governments and jump-start the economy.
One officer cycling through an early class said that his unit’s preparation for Iraq had consisted of “kick in the door, two in the chest,” recalled Sepp.
not try to do too much with your own hands,” Lawrence of Arabia had counseled. “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them.”
“It’s unclear to me how a higher degree of passivity would advance our mission,”
During his nine months in Baghdad, Horst had come to believe that the Shiite-dominated police were waging a coordinated campaign to clear Sunnis out of the capital’s mixed neighborhoods. Now he had proof.
The military was essentially handing power to a sectarian government and suspect militias.
Chapter Eleven - “What Would You Do, Lieutenant?”
primary focus in counterinsurgency wars should be on protecting the civilian population and not on killing the enemy.
counterinsurgency wars soldiers had to assume greater risks in order to distinguish the enemy from the innocents, safeguard the population, and in the end achieve greater safety. “The more you protect the force, the less secure you may be,” the doctrine warned.
On February 22, Sunni religious extremists struck the Al Askaria Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, destroying its famous golden dome.
Shiite gunmen, many of them members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia, known as Jaish al-Mahdi, went block by block in mixed neighborhoods forcing Sunnis
Worried about suicide attacks and car bombs, convoys now routinely fired off warning shots at cars that strayed too close. The gulf between occupier and occupied had never been wider.
Maliki was under tremendous pressure from Shiite political parties to fashion the army into a sectarian force.
had told Chiarelli that for most of his life he hadn’t even known whether his neighbors were Sunni or Shiite. They were all just Iraqis.
“My number one concern right now is a strategic or tactical miscalculation with Iran,” he’d told his staff a few weeks earlier. “We need to know what we are going to do in the first ten days of a war.”
“While we will continue to do everything we can militarily to contain sectarian violence in Baghdad, the situation will not improve until … Iraq’s leaders take appropriate action,” Casey told Abizaid. I
killings—all suggest a campaign to consolidate Shia power in Baghdad
“Hope is not a method,” she lectured. “I have heard over and over again that the Iraqi government must do this and the Iraq army must do that. Nobody disagrees. The brutal fact is that it is not happening.”
A temporary increase in forces might be “a bridge to a better place,” he suggested. “Perhaps,”
Chapter Twelve - The Army of the Tigris
Instead of arresting the decline by pushing more troops deep into Iraq’s most violent cities, the general had stuck with his approach of building up Iraqi forces and searching for a quick exit. “We have paid a very heavy price in American blood and treasure because of what is now agreed to by literally everyone as a failed policy,”
“Don’t pretend that you’re still trying to put the Iraqis in the lead when you’re taking over security responsibility from them,” he said. “You owe it to the troops.”
They marked the end of the post-Vietnam era for the Army. Ever since the disastrous war, senior Army leaders had tried, and ultimately failed, to keep their force from becoming too deeply embroiled in messy political wars that defied standard military solutions.
generals often focused more on exit strategies than on plans for victory.
sectarian cleansing in the months before his arrival ironically made Petraeus’s job easier. It allowed him to concentrate his troops on the fault lines between Sunni and Shiite areas where the violence was the most unrelenting.
Petraeus’s other big push was reconciliation. Most insurgents and militia fighters weren’t religious zealots and could be convinced to lay down their weapons. “We need to get as many people into the tent as possible,”
Anbar Awakening,
His essay argued that 800-soldier battalions had to be the nexus for all security, reconstruction, and military training efforts in counterinsurgency wars.
Maliki government was fueling the sectarian violence. U.S. commanders had to weigh their actions carefully to ensure that they weren’t building a Shiite-dominated government and police force that would crush the Sunni minority in Baghdad.
disputes driving the killing varied from city to city and even neighborhood to neighborhood. He knew he couldn’t dictate solutions to his battalion and company commanders. But he also couldn’t just allow everyone to stumble across their own answers. The morning briefing, he said, was going to be his mechanism for imposing his vision on a force of 170,000 troops sprawled across more than 120 combat outposts.
For all of his power, Petraeus was rarely in a position to dictate solutions. But by asking questions he could nudge his troops to search for answers.
The fighting and casualties didn’t harden soldiers. It broke them. Eventually discipline problems and suicides, which had risen with each year of the war, would spike.
“We are going after Al Qaeda,” Sheikh Khaled, a prominent Sunni imam, told him. “What we want you to do is stay out of the way.”
His counterinsurgency manual placed a heavy emphasis on co-opting locals. “These traditional authority figures often wield enough power to single-handedly drive an insurgency,”
“There’s an invisible red line out there. You won’t know it until you cross it,” Meyer said. “Once you cross it, it’s too late.”
Petraeus had pushed young officers to seek out local leaders, many of whom had supported the insurgency.
“anti-Iraqi forces,” the Orwellian term that Rumsfeld had once coined to describe the enemy when he decided that insurgent was too flattering.
“I’d like two armies: one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, distinguished and doddering generals … an Army that would be shown for a modest fee on every camp fairground,” the French officer says. “The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage who would not be put on display but from whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That’s the Army in which I should like to fight.”
Epilogue: Big Green
Casey wanted to locate the middle point somewhere between counterinsurgency and conventional combat that would allow the military to react in whichever direction it had to in the future.
“hybrid wars”
He’d made the Army feel smart again,
“Afghanistan is going to be the longest campaign of the long war,”
The test of whether Iraq had changed the Army permanently would not come in Afghanistan. It would come in the Pentagon, where the decisions were made about who got promoted, what equipment was bought, and how soldiers were trained.
from Kuwait into southern Iraq in 2003. Then the Army had for years believed almost unquestioningly in the wisdom of the Powell Doctrine