Before he could conquer Iraq, Petraeus first had to conquer the U.S. Army, an institution famously resistant to intellectuals such as this Princeton Ph.D. His most effective weapons were his fitness and his toughness. Even into his fifties, he was known for engaging in push-up contests with soldiers half his age—and winning. Intensely competitive, he interviewed potential aides by taking them out for a run and gradually ramping up the pace to see if they could keep up.
In 1991, while still a lieutenant colonel, he was accidentally shot in the chest with an M-16 by one of his own soldiers during a training exercise. He barely survived after emergency surgery performed by Dr. Bill Frist, a future Senate majority leader. Yet in less than a week he was demanding a discharge from the hospital so he could get back to his battalion. To prove to the doctors that he was good to go, he took the intravenous tubes out of his arm and dropped to the hospital floor to do fifty push-ups. Nine years later, while skydiving in 2000, Brigadier General Petraeus’s parachute collapsed seventy-five feet above the ground, and he landed so hard that he fractured his pelvis. He had to have a metal plate and screws inserted. But that did not keep him from returning to a punishing pace of work and workouts. Nor was he appreciably slowed in 2009 by a bout of prostate cancer that he kept secret and treated with radiation.
Petraeus had revealed that his slight frame—only five feet nine, 150 pounds—concealed impressive reservoirs of endurance. That enabled him to dispel doubts about whether he was too reserved and cerebral to lead men in combat, something he would not have a chance to do until 2003, when he was already a two-star general.
Unlike many officers of his generation, who hailed from clans with generations of military service, Petraeus was the first in his family to wear a uniform. He was born in 1952, an immigrant’s son. His father was a Dutch merchant-marine captain who had come to the United States after the Nazis overran the Netherlands and had captained American merchant vessels in some of the toughest convoys of World War II. His mother was a part-time librarian who imbued him with a love of reading. He grew up in Cornwall-on-Hudson a few miles from West Point, and when the time came to apply to college he could not resist the challenge of gaining admittance to this exclusive institution. The fierce competitiveness that would mark his entire career was exhibited at West Point, where he was a “star man,” meaning he was in the top 5 percent academically, as well as a cadet captain and a member of the ski and soccer teams. He even entered the premed program simply because it had the most demanding curriculum on campus. Shortly after graduation in 1974 he notched another accomplishment by marrying Holly Knowlton, the brainy daughter of the academy superintendent. Later he would become the only officer ever to finish first at both the Ranger School, a punishing nine-week endurance test, and the Army Command and General Staff College, a yearlong academic course for majors.
His insatiable hunger for accomplishment—his desire to win every contest, earn every ribbon, best every rival—along with his obvious intellect, which he made no effort to hide, irritated less driven and more low-key officers but was made somewhat more palatable by his disarming sense of humor, his seemingly low-key personality, and by his concern for the well-being of his fellow soldiers. At the Ranger School, for instance, he was credited with helping to push a buddy to complete the course. Later Petraeus would develop a reputation for nurturing junior officers. He was no Courtney Massengale, the self-centered, political general at the center of Anton Myrer’s best-selling novel Once an Eagle, a military favorite since its publication in 1968. But neither was he the sort of back-slapping, tobacco-chewing good ol’ boy who often rose to the top of the U.S. Army.
A different path was charted for him by one of his early mentors, General John Galvin, himself a soldier-scholar who would command NATO and in retirement become dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Galvin pushed young Captain Petraeus, then his aide, to pursue graduate studies in a civilian institution. He chose Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs and International Affairs, where from 1983 to 1985 he was exposed to viewpoints far outside the range normally heard in the army’s ranks. That experience helped make him comfortable in the academic and media worlds that are so alien to most soldiers.
While teaching at West Point’s Social Studies Department, Petraeus wrote his doctoral dissertation on the impact of the Vietnam War on the U.S. Army. It was a subject that had fascinated him since joining the army in the aftermath of that traumatic conflict. While on a training exercise in France in 1976, he had become an admirer of Marcel “Bruno” Bigeard, the legendary French paratrooper who had fought in World War II, Indochina, and Algeria; he later treasured an autographed photograph from Bigeard and corresponded with him until Bigeard’s death in 2010. He also read books by Bernard Fall, Jean Larteguy, David Halberstam, David Galula, and other authors who wrote about the French and American experience in Indochina. Most army officers in the 1980s were eager to put Vietnam behind them and to do as little as possible to prepare for counterinsurgency because this was seen as such a thankless form of warfare. Not Petraeus. In his Ph.D. thesis he argued “that American involvement in low-intensity conflict is unavoidable” and that “the military should be prepared for it.”
Petraeus’s own experience with such conflicts prior to Iraq had been distinctly limited. In 1986 he spent a summer working for General Galvin, by then head of U.S. Southern Command, during which he visited El Salvador and other Latin American countries to learn about their counterinsurgency operations. In 1995 he spent three months working for the United Nations on nation building in Haiti. Then, in 2001–02, he spent ten months in Bosnia on peacekeeping duty. These were the sum of Petraeus’s experiences not only with low-intensity conflict but with combat of any sort: he had missed out on the 1991 Gulf War, which for many of his peers had been a baptism of fire. While that conflict was raging, Petraeus, much to his frustration, had been in Washington as an aide to the army chief of staff, General Carl Vuono. Many of his peers looked down upon such assignments, far removed from the troops, and scoffed that Petraeus, like Colin Powell, was a “political general,” not a muddy-boots soldier. There was some truth to this gibe, at least prior to 2003, but such assignments gave Petraeus valuable exposure to the policy-making process and civil-military interactions at the highest level. He would draw on those experiences, which most of his peers did not have, when he entered Iraq at the head of the 101st Airborne Division in the spring of 2003. Like those other military intellectuals, Hubert Lyautey and T. E. Lawrence, he would show that he could not only think originally but act effectively in the cauldron of combat.
Few American commanders were well prepared for the chaotic post-invasion phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Too many officers neglected nation-building and instead, like the Israelis in Lebanon or, two centuries earlier, the French in Spain, chased after elusive insurgents in heavy-handed combat operations that killed or incarcerated too many Iraqis and thus wound up alienating the population. They were abetted in this wrongheaded approach by senior civilians such as the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who had capably run the Department of Defense in 1975–77 at the height of the Cold War but appeared out of his depth facing a very different sort of conflict. In 2003 he went so far as to deny that there was any “guerrilla war” in Iraq. Rumsfeld spoke contemptuously of the rebels as “pockets of dead enders” and seemed to think that the greatest threat Iraq faced was “creating a reliance or dependency” on American aid.
Petraeus, by contrast, was acutely aware that a powerful insurgency was growing and that it could not be stopped by firepower alone. In his headquarters in Mosul, he displayed a sign that showed his appreciation of the basic tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency as elucidated by David Galula and Robert Thompson: “We are in a race to win over the people. What have you and your element done to contribute to that goal today?” Without waiting for guidance from Baghdad—where Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior military officer, and Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the senior civilian, were hopelessly out of their depth—Petraeus began nation building across northern Iraq. He did not neglect offensive action; the 101st scored a notable coup by locating and killing Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, on July 22, 2003. But he emphasized nonkinetic “lines of operation.” He set up a representative government in northern Iraq, restarted telephone service, paved roads, created a police force, and even struck deals with Turkey and Syria to swap Iraqi oil for badly needed electricity.
Petraeus joked to a reporter that his role was a “combination of being the president and the Pope,” and some Iraqis nicknamed him “King David.” His high-profile role grated on more conventional officers, who groused that this major general was getting outside his “lane,” but Petraeus understood what they did not—that it was vital to establish a functioning government quickly, and that required someone to take ownership of Iraq’s myriad problems. He also understood another truth of modern war—that it was vital to engage in the “battle of the narrative.” As a result he was more open to the press than most of his peers were, yet he avoided the kind of indiscretions that later would prematurely end General Stanley McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan. Petraeus managed to convey candor in interviews while always staying “on message.” His expert manipulation of the news media did much to enhance not only his own career but also the missions he was charged with carrying out.
In mid-April 2004, less than two months after returning home with the 101st, Petraeus came back to Iraq to assess the state of the Iraqi security forces. He found their performance to be poor. In June, by now a lieutenant general, he took charge of a new organization, Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq, charged with equipping and training the Iraqi forces—an effort he later described as “building the world’s largest aircraft, while in flight, while it’s being designed, and while it’s being shot at.” He increased the number of soldiers and police from 95,000 to 192,000, but his efforts could not keep up with the pace of the deteriorating security situation. Desertion, corruption, and militia infiltration were rampant. As violence levels continued to rise, the Iraqis proved unable to take over security responsibilities from coalition forces. There were many times when Petraeus, in the opinion of two reporters who followed him closely, “looked tired and dispirited” even as he tried hard to project an air of confidence and determination.
In September 2005 he left Iraq to take command of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, charged with overseeing the army’s doctrine, training centers, and staff college. He later admitted, “Some suggested I was being sent out to pasture.” But he turned this backwater into an unlikely forum to remake the entire war effort.
The army’s doctrine for counterinsurgency, or, as it was known in the acronym-mad military, COIN, had not been revised for decades. Petraeus set out to create a new manual that drew not only on historical experience, especially in Algeria and Malaya, but also on the more recent experience of soldiers, including himself, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus chose an unconventional path for writing this manual of unconventional warfare—he enlisted not only brainy officers but also academics, journalists, aid workers, and others seldom if ever consulted by the military in the past. Petraeus explained that he sought their input because at Princeton he had benefited from his “out-of-my-intellectual-comfort-zone experience.” It would not have escaped the attention of this media-savvy general that involving influential civilians would help promote the product of the “COINdinistas” led by his old West Point classmate Conrad Crane. The resulting U.S. Army–Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was published in December 2006 and was immediately downloaded 1.5 million times. It was even reviewed in the New York Times, an honor accorded to no previous military manual.
The manual essentially encapsulated the best practices of population-centric counterinsurgency, drawing on classics written by the likes of Charles Callwell, T. E. Lawrence, Robert Thompson, and, above all, David Galula. It began with the basics: “The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance . . . by the balanced application of both military and nonmilitary means.” The manual stressed the importance of “unity of effort” between civil and military actors, the primacy of “political factors,” the need to “understand the environment,” and to provide “security for the civilian populace.” One of its most important pieces of advice was to “use the appropriate level of force”: “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to the recruitment of fifty more insurgents.”
In a similar vein the manual counseled that “some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot,” stressing the importance of information operations, political action, and economic development. The manual also warned, “Sometimes the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.” This was a direct criticism of the tendency of American units in Iraq to hunker down behind huge blast walls, cutting themselves off from contact with the population and making themselves easy prey for IED’s every time they ventured outside. There was also an implicit criticism of the misconduct committed at Abu Ghraib prison. Soldiers were warned to “treat non-combatants and detainees humanely.”
