Petraeus was spending much of his time that summer writing papers, or coordinating the assignment of papers to others, on various issues in the region. He’d typed up a list of these ideas under the heading, “War of Information Status Report,” invoking the term that Galvin had coined back in their days together at the 24th Infantry Division. Topics on the list included the links between drug traffickers and insurgents, the historical context of Latin America’s growing instability, a broad strategy for SouthCom, and why El Salvador was not like Vietnam, among others.

  Galvin gave Petraeus the task of ghostwriting the article for Parameters. There was no transcript of the London speech, nor had Galvin written out a text ahead of time. As usual on such occasions, he’d only scribbled some ideas and a rough outline on a small stack of three-by-five-inch note cards. He handed Petraeus the cards and told him to expand on them as he saw fit.

  The article, published in Parameters’ Winter 1986 issue, was called “Uncomfortable Wars: Toward a New Paradigm.” It was widely, and correctly, read as an assault on the Army establishment: an assault so direct and piercing that only a four-star general—and an unusually self-contained four-star general, at that—would have dared put his name on it. And only the most confident and nurtured young major would have dared go along for the ride, much less take control of the wheel, even anonymously.

  The article began:

  We in the military . . . tend to invent for ourselves a comfortable vision of war . . . one that fits our plans, our assumptions, our hopes, and our preconceived ideas. We arrange in our minds a war we can comprehend on our own terms, usually with an enemy who looks like us and acts like us. This comfortable conceptualization becomes the accepted way of seeing things and, as such, ceases to be an object for further investigation unless it comes under serious challenge as a result of some major event—usually a military disaster.

  Galvin’s warning, via Petraeus’s pen, was that the West was skating on the brink of that disaster. New kinds of conflict were coming to dominate the landscape: subversion, terrorism, guerrilla wars. “They do not fit into our image of war,” so we tend “to view them as being on the periphery.” We call them low-intensity conflicts, to suggest that they’re “a kind of appendage, an add-on, a lesser thing.” We are accustomed “to thinking about defeating our enemy by bringing combat power, primarily firepower, to bear on him.” Yet in these kinds of “revolutionary wars,” firepower was no longer so relevant. In these kinds of wars, the article went on—drawing on Galula and CORDS and the National Campaign Plan for El Salvador—the two sides “compete principally for the support of the national population.” And the government must not only fight the insurgents on the battlefield but also “reestablish its political legitimacy” by addressing “contentious, long-ignored, but popular issues tied to key facets of national life—sociopolitical, economic, educational, juridical.” In this kind of war, a doctrine based principally on firepower and body-counts may be not merely futile but disastrous. “If, for example, the military’s actions in killing 50 guerrillas cause 200 previously uncommitted citizens to join the insurgent cause,” the article argued, “the use of force will have been counterproductive.”

  It was an idea that Petraeus would repeat often years later.

  At this point in the article, Petraeus quoted his favorite passage from Larteguy’s The Centurions, about the two sides in the French Indochina War playing two different games with two different decks of cards. He then noted that, like the officers in that novel, “we are experiencing something new in warfare, something that requires us to restudy our doctrine, tactics, organization, and training.”

  The key problem lay in the ethos of the modern officer corps itself. “One reason we have accepted the comfortable vision of war,” the article continued, “is that we keep our noses to the grindstone of bureaucratic business and don’t look up very often.” The article concluded, in words reminiscent of Colonel Lincoln’s statement of purpose for West Point’s Sosh department, “Let us get our young leaders away from the grindstone now and then, and encourage them to reflect on developments outside the fortress-cloister. Only then will they develop into leaders capable of adapting to the changed environment of warfare and able to fashion a new paradigm that addresses all the dimensions of the conflicts that may lie ahead.”

  Twenty years later, after his first tour in the Iraq War as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, Petraeus wrote an article in the Army journal Military Review, under his own name, on how he learned to apply the principles of counterinsurgency during his occupation of Mosul. In it, he quoted those last passages from “Uncomfortable Wars,” and added, “General Galvin’s words were relevant then, but they are even more applicable today”—never noting that he was the one who’d written those words.

  At the end of the summer of 1986, after his brief posting at SouthCom was over, Petraeus returned to the “fortress-cloister” at West Point with a clearer vision of a plausible career path for himself in the Army—and a living example, in General Jack Galvin, of an officer who’d managed to rise through the ranks while prodding change from within.

  • • •

  First, though, Petraeus had to earn his PhD, and the summer with Galvin also gave him some ideas on how to do that. He turned the final third of his 328-page dissertation into an open appeal for the US military, especially his Army, to get over its post-Vietnam aversion to low-intensity conflicts and to take a deeper interest in counterinsurgency doctrine.

  The “reluctance to get involved in Central America with US troops,” he wrote, “was translated into military reluctance to develop plans for such potential operations, based apparently on the theory that if one has no plans, they cannot be executed.” However, he went on, reciting the argument that he’d ghostwritten for General Galvin in Parameters, small wars affecting US interests were not only more likely to take place than large wars, they were already upon us—and the military should “come to grips” with that fact by changing its doctrine, tactics, and personnel policies so that new officers could devise effective plans.

  “Lessons of history” can be “misleading,” he went on. It was well understood that the Cold Warriors of the early 1960s had distorted history when they likened the communist assault on South Vietnam to Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland or Czechoslovakia. Now, he wrote, the military chiefs of the mid-1980s were similarly “myopic” in seeing every third-world crisis as another Vietnam. He quoted Mark Twain on the broad issue of lessons:

  “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”

  Which way the Army would go—whether it continued to avoid all stove lids or came to realize that it might sometimes be necessary to sit on one—“will depend,” Petraeus concluded, “on forthcoming generations of military leaders” and “the lessons they take from Vietnam.”

  Petraeus was determined to be one of those new military leaders who sat on stove lids—and carried forth the forgotten, age-old lessons on how to do that.

  But not just yet.

  Petraeus’s adviser at Princeton, Richard Ullman, a prominent scholar of international relations, urged him to publish his dissertation as a book. The young officer was reluctant.

  Recently, an Army major named Andrew Krepinevich Jr., a former instructor in the Sosh department who graduated West Point in 1972, two years before Petraeus, had turned his dissertation, which he’d written at Harvard, into a book called The Army and Vietnam. In it, he argued that the United States lost the war not because of the news media or because politicians forced the generals to fight with one hand tied behind their backs (the military’s standard excuses), but rather because the Army’s commanders didn’t understand the kind of war they were fighting: they fought the kind of war they knew—a war waged with large units and heavy firepower, as they had in Korea and World War II—but the Viet Cong were fighting an insurgency war, which required a different approach.

  Krepinevich and Petraeus, it turned out, had read the same books on counterinsurgency, Malaya, and the Philippines. Shortly before his book was published, Krepinevich came to West Point to give a lecture about it. Petraeus, who had just started to teach in the Sosh department, attended the talk and approached the speaker afterward, practically bouncing with energy, eager to get a copy of his work, which seemed to reinforce and expand on some of the conclusions that he was gleaning from his own research.

  When Krepinevich’s book came out, the backlash was severe. Bruce Palmer Jr., a retired Army general and former Vietnam commander, wrote a scathing review in Parameters, condemning the author for his “crippling naivete,” his “lack of historical breadth and objectivity,” and his “abrasive” tone. Palmer was no lightweight. He had once been the Army’s acting chief of staff and was still on close terms with many active-duty generals. A four-star general like Jack Galvin might get away with broad swipes against the institutional culture, but not a major, not one writing under his own name, anyway. Palmer’s review was widely—and correctly—interpreted as a death-sentence for the upstart’s career. Krepinevich went on to a few staff jobs in the Pentagon as a military adviser to high-ranking civilians. But the notion that he might ever command a combat unit was out of the question. He was barred even from speaking again at West Point. (A few years later, he would retire from the Army as a lieutenant colonel and head up a defense-policy think tank.)

  Petraeus, too, was a mere major when he finished his dissertation. He may have been assertive, but he wasn’t crazy. Toward the end of his paper, he wrote, “Those who criticize the conventional wisdom do so at their own risk.” He then summarized the case of Major Krepinevich, but only in a footnote, ending it with the observation that a book review as harsh as the one in Parameters, written by a retired general with the cachet of Bruce Palmer, “can be unsettling to say the least.” Petraeus knew that he needed a star or two on his shoulders before he could openly wage his own War of Information on the Army itself—especially the sort of assault that he was advocating behind the scenes, first as General Galvin’s ghostwriter, then as the author of a dissertation that he was intent on ensuring almost no one would read.

  The task of publishing, promoting, and proselytizing a dissertation that pressured the Army to abandon its traditional ways, and embrace the doctrine of COIN, was left to Petraeus’s protégé, John Nagl.

  3.

  “Eating Soup with a Knife”

  When John Nagl and David Petraeus first met in the spring of 1987, they were both about to go to Europe for a close-up view of the Cold War’s climax.

  Nagl, finishing his third year at West Point, was the highest-ranking cadet in the Sosh department’s international relations section, a distinction rewarded with a summer internship at SHAPE—Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe—the military-operations branch of the Atlantic Alliance, situated on the outskirts of Mons, Belgium.

  Petraeus was wrapping up his second year as a Sosh professor. By contract, he was supposed to stay for a third year, but General Jack Galvin was on his way to SHAPE to take over as supreme allied commander, and Petraeus again asked his mentor if he could tag along as his speechwriter, not just for the summer but full-time. A phone call from a four-star could override all other obligations; Galvin made the call, and Petraeus’s days at the academy were over.

  Nagl had seen Petraeus in the Sosh corridors but had never taken a class with him. Since they would both soon be at SHAPE, another professor in the department introduced them to each other. Petraeus had just finished his dissertation and proudly showed Nagl a copy. Nagl gave it a glance but nothing more. He still saw his future in the armor corps along the East–West German border. Like most of his fellow cadets, like most Army officers, he regarded the Vietnam War as ancient history, to the extent that he thought about it at all.

  Though he was cutting out early, Petraeus had been on the Sosh faculty long enough to absorb the ethos and traditions of the Lincoln Brigade: the sense of fraternity, the value of networking, and the admonition by the department’s founder, Colonel “Abe” Lincoln, to “pick good people, pick them young, help them to grow, keep in touch.” Petraeus figured that Nagl must be smart, given his class ranking. He noticed the same gleam in the eye that he’d possessed at Nagl’s age, thirteen years earlier. So when Nagl dropped by Petraeus’s office that summer to say hello, the major cleared a corner of his desk where the cadet could work and invited him to stay.

  The two didn’t talk much about counterinsurgency or El Salvador, though the civil war there was still going on. Petraeus had enough SHAPE business to keep him busy: the startling phenomenon of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s new reformist leader; the Reagan-Gorbachev nuclear arms talks to remove all medium-range missiles from Europe; the prospect of unilateral Soviet troop cuts from East Germany and Czechoslovakia; and, at the same time as all this, discussions within the NATO alliance on continuing to “modernize” tanks, planes, and other major weapons, in case Gorbachev was ousted in a coup or turned out to be a fake.

  Nagl too was immersed that summer in classic Cold War issues, spending much of his time at the corner of Petraeus’s desk, writing a senior thesis on interoperability, the nuts-and-bolts issue of ensuring that NATO’s sixteen nations were able to use one another’s weapons, bases, and supply lines in case they had to fight a war together. In between his own projects for Galvin, Petraeus supervised Nagl’s thesis as if he were conducting a tutorial back at West Point, peppering him with questions, suggesting research material, and copyediting his drafts. Petraeus thought it was one of the best papers by a cadet that he’d ever read, maybe the best paper on the topic by anybody.

  Petraeus knew that Nagl was angling to win a Rhodes Scholarship after graduating the following year. He wrote a letter of recommendation and got General Galvin to sign it.

  Nagl went back to West Point in the fall, graduated in the top 2 percent of his class, won the Rhodes, and studied international relations at Oxford for the next two years. While he was there, the Berlin Wall crumbled. Soon after he got back to the States, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and Nagl was sent to Saudi Arabia with the 1st Cavalry Division as part of Operation Desert Shield. Then came the American counterattack known as Desert Storm, the rapid crushing of Iraq’s crack forces, and Nagl’s realization that there were no longer any countries in the world capable of confronting the US Army in tank-on-tank warfare—the sort of warfare for which Nagl had been preparing.

  Still, Nagl’s crisis at this point was merely a personal matter: what was he going to do with the rest of his life? The shift in global politics didn’t seem to pose a threat to national security. The United States might face different kinds of challenges—from guerrillas, terrorists, shadow warriors of various sorts—but, at first glance, they didn’t seem very formidable. In southern Iraq, his tank platoon had come across Iraqi foot soldiers hiding in the dunes—not the sorts of targets that he and his men were trained to fight, but taking them out had been no problem.

  Then, almost exactly a year later, on February 14, 1992, Nagl fought a second conflict. This one took place at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, a vast stretch of the Mojave Desert—nearly one thousand square miles of uncluttered terrain—that the Army had turned into a complex of mock battlefields a dozen years earlier to give soldiers a round of fairly realistic training. The center’s scenarios were nearly always the same: the “Krasnovian” army—a stand-in for the Soviets, played by an American unit whose entire mission was to play the “Red Team” in these war games—has invaded an ally; the US combat unit rotating through the training center that week must defend the territory and defeat the enemy.

  Nagl’s tank company, equipped with brand-new M-1 tanks, had no problem blowing away the Krasnovians, who were using slightly older American tanks, modified to resemble Russian T-72s and T-80s. But at one point in the mock battle, some of the Krasnovian soldiers dismounted from their tanks, maneuvered on foot, and managed to surround and obliterate Nagl’s unit. One of the most up-to-date tank companies in the US Army was, as Nagl later put it in an article about the exercise, “decimated by a light-infantry company of approximately 150 men.”

  The main difference, it seemed, between the real enemies in Iraq and the pretend ones in California was that the former fought badly and the latter fought well. What if the next real enemies were more skilled than the Iraqis had been? Ever since Desert Storm, Nagl had thought that his nation might soon have to face new, more furtive kinds of foes. Now, after the war game at Fort Irwin, he had a more disturbing thought: his Army didn’t know how to fight them.

  • • •

  Not long after the battle at Fort Irwin, Nagl went back to Oxford. He was about to marry the British girlfriend he’d left there, Susanne Varga, a student of French and German literature whose parents had fled Hungary in 1956 during the Soviet crackdown. Nagl’s official rationale for returning, though, was to earn a doctorate degree and, in the process, to write a dissertation that somehow came to grips with this new face of warfare.

  Nagl never read Petraeus’s dissertation, nor had he ever come across David Galula’s work, which was out of print. But now, back at Oxford, he did read the British counterinsurgency classics, which made similar points, including some of the books that Petraeus had perused a decade earlier: Kitson, Thompson, Colonel C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice. From there, he embarked on a research project about Britain’s colonial war in Malaya. On a trip to the National Army Museum in the Chelsea section of London, he came upon the papers—thirty boxes’ worth—of Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, the British commander who defeated the Malayan insurgency. Only two other scholars before Nagl had ever checked out this cache of documents. Nagl’s friends were telling him that he was crazy to write his dissertation on such a thoroughly discarded topic. The dust gathered on Templer’s papers seemed to confirm that he was headed down a lonely alleyway.