ARTICLE: "Brainiac Brigade: Some of the military's finest minds helped craft the strategy that has produced some signs of good news out of Iraq. But even they don't know if it will work," by Babak Dehghanpisheh and John Barry, Newsweek, 17 September 2007, p. 38.

I like Petraeus a lot, just like I like Jim Mattis. These guys aren't perfect, and although they're making a huge effort to change things around them, they don't always succeed and they can easily succumb to the what-I-say-depends-on-where-I-sit-right-now syndrome.

But guys like these not only have their heads in the right places, their hearts are attached.

I met Mattis first time in Quantico for the Rumsfeld piece. He told me about reading the original Esquire "Pentagon's New Map" in his tent the night before leading his troops into Iraq. Naturally, we bonded.

Mattis is an amazing guy who so impressed me in that F2F that I knew I wanted to profile him somewhere down the road.

Later, in the late summer of 2005, he invited me down to Quantico to address the class of Marine Corps University (I remember that gig because I got lost on the way there from Art Cebrowski's funeral and showed up a bit late and out of it, but it was a great and rowdy crowd; it was also the first time Jenn Posda saw me live).

Somewhere in the same time frame I got an email from Petraeus, who knew me from the blog. He invited me to speak to the class of the Command & General Staff College study body, which I did in December 2005.

Taking advantage of both trips, I pitched Esquire (meaning, Mark Warren) on the idea of doing a piece on these two, plus Wallace, Abizaid and Schoomaker. Abizaid's commanders advisory group (originally begun by McMaster, I believe) had brought me down to Tampa in the fall of 2005 (resulting in the pic used by WaPo later), and Schoomaker (whom I briefed in 1999 at SOCOM on Y2K and whom I interviewed in the PNT in the spring of 2005 on Rumsfeld) had me down to TX to brief a senior group of Army 3-stars he hosted in a special retreat.

That piece became "The Monks of War" (with Abizaid and Schoomaker trimmed for length, unfortunately, as my first draft was 16k).

I give this recap simply to make what I say next seem reasonable.

I know there's a ton of frustration within the U.S. military about the pace of change (some want it much faster and express that desire for speed in a "war footing" argument, and some want it obviated by a return to a big war focus on China--or Iran--in the meantime). I know there's a lot of frustration with the top leaders.

But I've been in this business for just over 17 years as a paid professional, and I have to tell you, this cohort of top generals is awfully good--in fact the best I've worked with over the years by far.

Are they enough? Nobody's ever enough for a bureaucracy as large as DoD, but they're definitely moving the pile.

Yes, there are a lot of obvious obstacles that could be removed more rapidly, and it's sad to say that a lot of pain must be registered in this system before it reforms itself or allows a shifting of power and resources from office to office.

Having said all that, what Petraeus and this cohort (to include the brainiacs cited in this article: Kilcullen, Newton, Meese, McMaster and Mansoor--and let's not forget Nagl or Chiarelli) are doing right now to reposition the U.S. military on COIN and to make the next best effort at it in Iraq right now is nothing less than amazing.

Yes, they were dealt a truly shitty hand by a political leadership that continues--in my opinion--to work against their best interests strategically. There is only so much they can do in Iraq, given these profound limits, but they're doing plenty with what they've got, and best of all, they're accumulating seriously good operational experience. Instead of just jerking around the troops, there seems to be real purpose and focus to our operations in Iraq right now, and like a good drive for a football team, each play inspires more confidence.

And so there's no question but you support this military in this effort at this time, and you understand their request to stay in the game and finish it out to the best of their troops' ability. This is important not just for Iraq, or the region, or America. It's hugely important for our military as we move ahead.

Iraq as easy-takedown-win-segueing-into-disastrous-insurgency-pulled-back-into-semi-stable-postwar-recovering-situation-where-the-fake-state-bottoms-out-and-begins-the-long-slow-climb-from-chaos is a difficult story for many Americans to swallow, especially since we were sold a complete fantasy on Iraq's rebuild into a stable democracy on a 6-12-18 month basis (I can pull the articles on that one from PNM, if you like), and when that didn't happen, public opinion and Bush's opposition backtracked and retro-actively made the WMD thing THE SINGLE SALE (which it never was, but when you f--k up that bad, you deserve what you get in criticism from any and all corners).

But truth be told, from my angle, this trajectory is about as good as my pessimistic soul could muster right from the beginning.

Here's what I wrote in the original PNM article:

The Middle East has long been a neighborhood of bullies eager to pick on the weak. Israel is still around because it has become—sadly—one of the toughest bullies on the block. The only thing that will change that nasty environment and open the floodgates for change is if some external power steps in and plays Leviathan full-time. Taking down Saddam, the region’s bully-in-chief, will force the U.S. into playing that role far more fully than it has over the past several decades, primarily because Iraq is the Yugoslavia of the Middle East—a crossroads of civilizations that has historically required a dictatorship to keep the peace. As baby-sitting jobs go, this one will be a doozy, making our lengthy efforts in postwar Germany and Japan look simple in retrospect.

What I meant by "look simple in retrospect," being someone focused on institutional change, was that the U.S. military that defeated Germany and Japan in WWII and then immediately segued into effective occupation forces was a force/defense establishment/political leadership that was quite prepared for the necessary transition. You have to remember, that generation had mobilized to deal with the Great Depression, then the war, and by this time was quite comfortable and confident in its nation-building mode. The U.S. had gone majority urban around 1920, and the closing of the Western frontier had been only 30 years before that. These were not alien concepts. There was no institutional or ideological bias against this sort of work. We had people who knew how to do it, had done it, and were fully committed to doing it well after WWII because they didn't want to have to go back for a third round in their lifetimes.

The force/defense establishment/political leadership that went into Iraq was none of those things, had none of that bias or confidence or realistic expectations (my column this weekend). We had spent the previous quarter century running away from that experience in Vietnam (where we came very close to learning what we needed to learn just before the bottom fell out). Given enough time, the changes would have come, however painfully, back then. But that was just not meant to be, given the strategic environment. Frankly, Vietnam was meaningless in the grand scheme of things. In retrospect, detente with the USSR and the opening up of China were the big tasks of that age, with the rise of OPEC and the Middle East the great harbinger of what would come next.

But Vietnam was huge in our pysche, and in terms of the U.S. military's lessons learned. A generation of officers led that battered and insecure force out of the jungle and resurrected it into the massive Leviathan that loomed over the planet at Cold War's end.

Unfortunately, as I and others argue, that Leviathan was essentially mismatched for the world that followed. The realists were dead wrong: no great power sought to balance our military. Instead, they chose to trust it, and how we'd use it.

Across the 1990s, that trust seemed reasonably rewarded. When the emergent Core saw something bad enough (in their calculations), they dealt with it, like the Balkans. Many things didn't register, but when the response was made, it was pretty good (the origins, in my argument, of the A-to-Z rule set on processing politically bankrupt states).

We were beginning to learn how to run this system in terms of failed states, awkwardly but getting smarter over time.

Bush and Co. come in with a disdain for all that. Don't want to do failed states. Don't want to nation-build. Want to go long on the high-tech Leivathan and gear up for one sexy war with China (the EP-3 as preview).

By the time 9/11 rolled around, "transformation" was in full mode and the Bush administration had successfully begun alienating much of the world.

Then we got the boost from 9/11, used it to srtike fast at the Taliban, and then Bush pulled the trigger on Saddam, while the iron was still hot.

As my clip from above proves, I was all for making that call.

I had no illusions about how hard it would be in the postwar.

In many ways, I was counting on it as a trigger for change I believed was necessary--to include my note in that article that we'd eventually have to tackle the task of creating a regional security regime/dialogue (just like the Iraq Study Group argued three years later).

You got to remember, back at the beginning of 2000 I did a thought piece on a 9/11-like strike called "Life After DoDth, or: How the Evernet Changes Everything.". In that piece, on a dare from Art Cebrowski (who felt we weren't learning what we needed to learn about the future of national security from the Y2K experience, largely because we had the luxury of scheduling that test in advance), I imagined a 9/11-like disaster that made the Pentagon look completely irrelevant to the threat at hand. In the article, I went with the electronic Pearl Harbor, because that was a hot concept then and it made a truly weird article easier to get published (remember, I'm slipping this past the editorial board of Proceedings), but frankly, I wasn't interested in what would cause the disruptive system perturbation, I was just interested in how we'd response.

One of the big responses I predicted was a bifurcation of the national security establishment into a Leviathan-like entity (Department of Global Deterrence) and a SysAdmin-like entity (Department of Network Security).

My argument went like this:

The result? DoD will be broken into two separate organizations:

-->The Department of Global Deterrence (DGD), to focus on preventing and, if necessary, fighting large-scale conventional and/or weapons-of-mass-destruction-enhanced warfare among nation-states

-->The Department of Network Security (DNS), to focus on maintaining the United States' vast electronic and commercial connectivity with the outside world, including protection and large-scale emergency reconstitution of the Evernet, and to perform all the standard crisis-response activity short of war (with a ballooning portfolio in medical).
In effect, we will split DoD into a warfighting force (DGD) and a global emergency-response force (DNS), with the latter aspiring to as much global collaboration as possible (ultimately disintermediating the United Nations) and the former to virtually none. To put it another way, DGD is deterrence; DNS is assurance.

Who gets the "kids" in this divorce?

DGD includes:

U.S. Army (ground & armored)
U.S. Air Force (combat)
U.S. Navy (strategic)
DNS includes:

U.S. Army (airborne)
U.S. Air Force (mobility and space)
U.S. Marine Corps
U.S. Navy (rest)
Air/Army National Guards.[21]
DNS also picks up the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Information Agency, U.S. Customs, and a host of other specialized units from other federal agencies (e.g., Justice, Treasury).

DNS will discard the traditional notion of military service separate from civilian life. For most personnel, it will adopt a consultancy model, whereby the agency rents career time versus buying entire lifetimes (essentially the National Guard model). DNS's officer corps will remain career managers, but with frequent real-world tours of duty in technology, industrial, and business fields. This organization will be networked in the extreme, because networks will be what it is all about. This means no separate legal system and the end to posse comitatus restrictions.

But when 9/11 happened and then we got the anthrax strikes (still the great mystery we all now forget), the political system zigged when it should have zagged. Instead of creating the US-outward-security-network force, it created the firewall-stop-them-at-the-border force.

Frankly, I was stunned at the choice. At the great dawning of the age of connectivity, we looked completely inward instead of outward.

So when Iraq is teed up, not only am I attracted to the "big bang" argument (Peters made a gloriously forceful argument for that view yesterday at Leavenworth), I see the tipping point on my bifurcated force. If 9/11 wouldn't do it, this would.

And I believe it has, as evidenced by my "The Americans Have Landed" description of the naturally-arrived-at bifurcation between Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa and Special Operations Command-Central Command.

But that's the experimental, off-grid version.

The real bifurcation of the U.S. military comes as a result of the rise of the SysAdmin package in response to immense failure. Bush and Co. provided that failure in their horrific mismanagement of Iraq's postwar, but as I point out in this week's column, that political leadership plus the military's institutional bias against such stuff was a match made in hell.

Into that void steps Petraeus, Chiarelli, Mattis, Nagl, McMaster, Kilcullen et. al. This gap in capabilities was no news to any of them, and they sure as hell didn't need to read my stuff to catch up. They were already there, mostly on the basis of experience in places like Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans and Afghanistan.

My stuff wasn't ahead of its time for these guys. It was right on time. Most grand strategy and futurology is just that: helping you figure out today and getting you caught up. It's the old bit about running as fast as you can just to stay in place.

So we blow the "lost year," and Bush and Co. diddle through 2004 and 2005 and 2006 and then finally we see some serious monks of war get their chance to try out their just-published COIN in Iraq.

And you know what? Most people (like Peters) think only about half of that manual is being applied or is useful and the other half is being learned rapidly in theater, meaning it was an awfully good first cut.

Part of me wants that learning process to continue, even at the relatively high cost in personnel (by today's standards). But another part of me knows that Bush and Co. have teed up Iran, and so I fear this great tipping-point experience is going to get lost in the shuffle toward what I think will be a bad war that's badly waged and gets us bad outcomes. Plus, I just think it's a stupid war because:

1) there's no need to go all wobbly over Iran getting WMD, like we've never processed a scary state before on that score (like Mao's f--king insane China of the early-mid-late 1960s);

2) you've just got to find a place for Iran in this Shia revival we both triggered and need to succeed on several levels if pluralism going to come about in the region;

3) it's just the wrong fight with the wrong nation at the wrong time (Iran's regime is plenty ripe for a soft kill, if only we didn't have such unimaginative people at the helm who can only spout the same self-deluding truisms every time you raise the subject);

4) you simply won't get the acquiescence of the New Core on Iran like you did on Iraq, partly because you screwed up Iraq so bad and partly because Iran's oil and gas is too important to this crew; and

5) if you think Bush and Co. screwed up the postwar in Iraq, I guarantee you, whatever the level of strikes we bring to Iran, they'll screw it up even worse, if for only the reason that no one will help us and we're already stretched to the limits in our isolation in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Besides fearing this solid effort by our military in Iraq will be swept aside by a war with Iran, I know that even if the Bush administration does not take that feared plunge, it'll nonetheless send America back into the arms of both Tel Aviv's and Riyadh's hardliners in their shared anti-Shia fears, meaning the sum total effect of 8 years of Bush will be to return us to the same, grotesquely dysfunctional dynamics that defined the Middle East prior to 9/11: we unblinkingly back Israel and Sunni dictatorships and--by doing so--keep the Shia down throughout the region by encouraging authoritarianism aligned with U.S. interests, and that only gets you back in the business of supporting the decrepit regimes that--in turn--implicitly support al Qaeda.

If we go down that path, it won't matter what my military learns in Iraq. It won't matter what Petraeus and Co. achieve. All of that will be jettisoned eventually by an American public that you can't fool all of the time.

I know some would like just such an outcome (better to make the Middle East a "blip" in our long-term preparations for our brilliant wars of the future with China), but I think it would be a complete disaster, capable of killing this era's globalization.

So yeah, I get the anti-war effort. They want Bush and Co. stopped.

I do too, because I think they are still capable of screwing up a whole lot more than just Iraq (and believe me, there are multitudes of people within the USG working to prevent just such an outcome, because they'll all still be there once Bush and the neocons move out). I just don't think it's a matter of stopping this administration on Iraq any more, because they've outsourced their political leadership to Petraeus and company (which I approve of) and because they've basically "moved on," if I can borrow that phrase, to their next target. Problem is, as I've stated many times, this crew just has no idea what a match they'd be lighting on this one.

I used to wave off comparisons of today's globalization to that of pre-WWI Europe, but I can't any more, or at least not as long as Bush remains in office.

I believe we are capable of that level of strategic stupidity and self-destruction.

But putting all that larger fear aside, I also worry that a somewhat imbalanced, way-too-religious leader of a nuclear power might just do something incredibly dangerous before leaving office in 2009.

Okay, I'm still talking about Bush because Ahmadinejad doesn't hold any of those levers in Iran.

Bottom line to wrap up this long post: if enough forces rise up to keep Bush on the defensive until the end of his term and we prevent Cheney's desired war with Iran, I think Petraeus and company will forge something approaching a realistic "win" in Iraq by the time the next president emerges.

By that I don't mean some resurrected Iraqi unitary state, much less any democracy.

I mean only a loosely tri-federated Iraq where economic connectivity is blossoming (a sure thing in Kurdistan absent some complete security collapse) distant from the capital and Baghdad is kept from turning into some 21st century Beirut.

Believe it or not, that's always been my definition of an acceptable and realistic "win." Better versions seemed possible at points in the past, but we simply didn't take advantage of them. Now, this is as good as it gets, and in that respect, it ends up looking an awful lot like a Balkans-done-backwards.

We run that scenario down to the point where we've achieved the Vietnam-in-reverse (from kinetics to advising) and we might just end up locking in the SysAdmin evolution one helluva lot faster than I ever hoped could be achieved.

So you see my back-and-forth: I want Iraq to unfold much as Bush says he wants it to unfold, but I also don't want to let him off that hook because I fear where he'll take us next, a scenario that I think will lay waste all our previous effort on Iraq plus quite possibly destroy both the evolution of the Army toward the SysAdmin function and this era of globalization itself.

So I agree with Ted O'Connor. We are 300 million desperately in search of leadership. Petraeus fills a big hole, but far larger ones exist.