Steve Coll:

David Petraeus is a professional briefer, and with a PowerPoint slide before him he will slip into a salesman’s rapid-fire patter. He illustrates his remarks with a laser pointer; he will swirl a bright dot of emerald light around a particular sentence fragment until a listener risks succumbing to hypnosis. Petraeus and his staff will discuss at length the shading of colors on a slide, or the direction of arrows depicting causality. When I asked, in a skeptical tone, about this passionate use of PowerPoint, the General responded in the staccato of the medium: “It’s how you communicate big ideas—to communicate them effectively.”

In counter-insurgency operations, Petraeus has written, the critical issue for military commanders is “how to think, rather than what to think.” In part because insurgencies and civil conflicts involve political and perceptual contests as well as military ones, “tactics—both those of the enemy and our own—constantly change, and the winning side is generally that which learns faster.”

“What works in Iraq definitely won’t work in Pakistan in the same way,” Petraeus said. “I mean, you cannot envision large numbers of Americans on the ground in any scenario, at least not in the way that they are here.”

The General’s Dilemma

The Big Picture:

Over five years since it began, the war in Iraq continues, but with some recent notable progress. On Monday this week, American forces formally returned responsibility for the security of Anbar Province, at one time, the center of the Sunni insurgency, to the Iraqi Army and police force. Violence in the region has decreased dramatically - attacks down by 90% over the past two years. The continuing relative peace and order in the region remains a fragile scenario, with many former insurgents now acting as police, or as gunmen allied with American-backed "Awakening Councils". Here are some scenes from around Iraq (and a couple from here in the U.S.) over the past several months.

Scenes from Iraq

It's not surprising that the Defense Department has reacted negatively to soldier blogging. The military is a strenuously hierarchical institution, with finely graded ranks and carefully managed authority. Social networks create new openings for soldiers to step outside that hierarchy, even while deployed, and share their perspective to large and strategically important audiences. That gives military planners pause. Yet isn't it axiomatic that soldiers are entitled to exercise the freedoms they are willing to die for? It was that principle, coupled with antiwar activism, that drove America's last successful popular effort to amend the Constitution, to grant suffrage at the age of enlistment. Today's soldiers have much more modest requests. They want to network with new people, commune with friends and family, and share their stories with anyone out there who wants to listen. Pentagon leaders should be first in line.

Web War

Traditional, irregular, terrorist, and disruptive threats may no longer be separate threats or modes of war. Instead, we see an increased merging or blurring ... Future contingencies will present hybrid threats specifically designed to target US vulnerabilities.

Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars

Second Lieutenant Dave Hagner was tall and smooth-faced, and like many other marines he carried himself in a way that brought his toughness into uncomfortable contrast with his youth. He was twenty-seven, older than the men in the platoon he commanded. During the day he worked out and joked around and daydreamed of the boat he would buy when he left the Marine Corps. It was long and sleek, and probably it would be white. It would whisk him light and free above Hawaiian reefs, chasing marlin, sailfish, sharks. He intended, in retirement, to be an old man by the sea.

At night he put the boat aside, slipped into his body armor, checked his rifle and his radio, his ammo clips and night-vision goggles and safety glasses. He pulled on gloves, pushed in earplugs. If he felt lucky, or unlucky, he would ask aloud how the mission would go and toss into the air an angular stone painted with various prophecies, like the Magic 8-Balls you can buy at toyshops. Fortune found, Hagner led his platoon into the ruined, stinking maze of Ramadi. Quietly they slipped by packs of feral dogs, lagoons of sewage. They stepped around the unexploded mortars and crept under open windows, the soft sounds of whispered Arabic falling over them, the speakers unaware of, or unconcerned about, the passage of armed men. When they reached a certain neighborhood, Hagner’s marines would burst into houses and bring the male occupants to him as they blinked off sleep.

Then the questioning began.

Neil Shea, in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Ramadi Nights

George Packer:

The other night, I had a drink with two of the soldiers who collectively wrote a New York Times Op-Ed piece, published in August.

What struck me in our conversation was that these two soldiers were not completely disillusioned with the Army or with the difficult type of warfare that Iraq forced on them. One of them had recently been promoted and plans to stay in the Army; the other admitted that he wanted to go back to Iraq. They hope to write, with other soldiers, a book about counterinsurgency that would examine the Army’s new field manual against their experience fighting the complex array of warring factions in Iraq -- not to refute it but to improve it. In short, they’re exactly the sort of soldiers the Army needs to keep.

I wonder how long their precious knowledge will be valued by a military and a country that already show signs of wanting to consign Iraq to the memory hole where, three decades ago, Vietnam disappeared.

Also, from last month:

If innovative officers see that their innovations are not valued, they'll either conform or leave.

From a year ago:

... emergency measures have taken a heavy toll on ... the career decisions of some of the Army’s most promising young officers.

And from even farther back:

Bearing "true faith" to the Constitution requires military personnel to speak out, regardless of the cost, when they think our civilian leaders have gone beyond the pale. Both our democracy and the lives of the soldiers who fight in our name depend on it. If officers remain silent when our military policies go terribly wrong, there's little the rest of us can do to set things right again.

Dulce et Decorum

A reporter from Spiegel visits Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to see how the new Army is shaping up. The short of it: this is going to be a long, hard slog.

In the end the visitor is left with the feeling that a revolution is being launched here in Fort Leavenworth, one that will radically change the face of the United States military and the wars it will fight in the future.

... until they began learning from experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army's worldview was still colored by the logic of the Cold War, which divided the world into clear-cut blocs. Military leaders were primarily focused on a big picture ...

It took commanders who could implement changes and who had the courage to question the Pentagon's old-school way of thinking ...

The decision to remove Petraeus, who was clearly the best man for the job, triggered an outcry in the press and the political arena. He was portrayed as the shining hope for a new Iraq and for the American military -- even as a new Lawrence of Arabia. Nowadays, he is considered a candidate for a fourth star, and those who worked with him hope that he may one day lead the entire US Army.

...

An instructor asks his students: "In your opinion, how has the US's view of the world changed since Sept. 11?" A female student says, in a piercing voice: "We now know that we have to take them out before they take us out." It isn't the answer the instructor was looking for.

...

In an effort to teach skepticism and critical thinking, the instructors are constantly asking their students trick questions and presenting them with paradoxes, rewiring their brains to help them understand the new military doctrine.

The great litany of Fort Leavenworth is that everything must change.

See also the interview with David Petraeus.

Civilized Warriors: The US Army Learns from its Mistakes in Iraq

Petraeus is one of the leaders you're looking for. Have you read the new Counterinsurgency manual?

Spiegel: Would you agree that you are trying to impose a sort of a cultural revolution on the United States Army?

Petraeus: There is quite a big cultural change going on. We used to say, that if you can do the "big stuff," the big combined arms, high-end, high intensity major combat operations and have a disciplined force, then you can do the so-called "little stuff," too. That turned out to be wrong.

...

You know, people look at this in theory and think, well, we're dealing here with the training of a couple of battalions -- give them rifles, vehicles, materials, stuff like that, rebuild their infrastructure. But it has cost $2 billion so far -- and that's real money.

And that's the easiest part of it, actually. The hard part is building the institutions to support the new security system, and I'm not only talking about logistics here. I'm talking about the policies, the big over-arching ideas, I'm talking about the set of values on which this system is built. These are questions that are constitutional almost by nature. And I'm talking about ministries, communications systems, depot and maintenance programs, branch schools and training centers, airfields, naval bases, barracks and so on.

Change is Hard.

What we are trying to do is to present counter-intuitive situations to people to really make them think. And counterinsurgency operations are war at the graduate level, they're thinking man's warfare.

What we simply don't want anymore is to give people a checklist of what to do. We want them to think, not memorize.

Petraeus wants to send young officers to graduate school.

See also the companion piece on a visit to Fort Leavenworth.

SPIEGEL Interview with US General David Petraeus

The Army has just updated its counterinsurgency manual; it includes an appendix on "Social Network Analysis and Other Analytical Tools".

FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency

A military watchdog group is asking the Pentagon whether senior uniformed officers, including Brig. Gen. Vince Brooks, the former public affairs director of the Army, had permission to appear in a video endorsing an evangelical Christian group.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is preparing a possible class-action lawsuit against the Pentagon for "the creation of a theocracy, of a particular fundamentalist perspective within our own military branches."

The foundation says a core of evangelicals are gaining influence at the Pentagon, and violating military policies. It cites Wednesday-morning prayer sessions in the Pentagon's executive dining room.

Here's the same story, over at Salon:

Former Air Force officer Mikey Weinstein (MRFF) says evangelicals are trying to turn his beloved military into a "frickin' faith-based initiative."

Here's coverage from the "Associated Baptist Press":

The influence of evangelical Christians in the military's highest ranks is again under question, after complaints ...

NPR : Religious Group's Ties to Pentagon Questioned