ARTICLE: 'Counterinsurgency Comeback,' By MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS, Wall Street Journal, September 6, 2007; Page A17

Great piece by Mac Owens, longtime Naval War College prof and rather prolific author of articles. This is a thinking man's version of a slide I've long had in the brief about the Army's ambivalent embrace of the SysAdmin reality. Mac captures the enormity of the cultural shift, which I call a once-in-a-century sort of change. It's this shift that really marks the end of the Vietnam syndrome, and that couldn't be a bigger deal for an Army that spent the last three decades distancing itself from Vietnam. In that regard, the work of the mighty handful (Petraeus, Mattis, Wallace, McMasters, Nagl, plus the Aussie Kilcullen) is truly historic. Especially to the extent Petraeus secures this legacy, he becomes the LeMay or Cebrowski of his age: the flag who not only changes his service's definition of warfare, but that of the military as a whole. To have a Petraeus pull that off, as I see him doing (and this constitutes my main interest in a surge I know came too late in Iraq) so soon after Cebrowski et. al made the net-centric definition the basis for transforming the mindset of the Leviathan, effectively completes the Leviathan-SysAdmin split, now on display between SOCCENT and CJTF-HOA in Eastern Africa. In short, it's been an amazing 18 years to have been working with the U.S. Military. (Thanks: Tyler Durden)