The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War

The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War By Fred Kaplan New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. 2013 418 pages $28.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For my promotion, John Nagl gave me a copy of Fred Kaplan's The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War signed by the military journalist himself. And so, the book opens: "A few days shy of his 25th birthday, John Nagl saw his future disappear." The book chronicles a small group's attempt to shift the American way of war from one of high-tech, big weapons focused on enemy combatants, to one that held people as the center of gravity. Kaplan's account--there are others, and there will be more--is worth a read, even if Nagl isn't your friend. The Insurgents is a readable and informative account of a critical time in the history of American involvement in conflicts overseas, regardless of whether or not you accept the conclusions. Throughout the book, Kaplan weaves descriptions of the Department of Defense culture-including examples like Andy Marshall's Revolution in Military Affairs, and Bosnia not being a "real war"--with the academic and military background of a small group of thinkers, many anchored in West Point and its Department of Social Sciences. This group includes David Petraeus, John Nagl, David Kilcullen, Mike Meese, Ike Wilson, H. R. McMaster, Sarah Sewell, Gunner Sepp, Bill Hix, and their most important professional and academic influencers--Jack Galvin, David Galula, Alexander George, T. E. Lawrence, and others. Kaplan provides the reader a play-by-play account of the intellectual wrangling that occurred within the Pentagon, inside the national security decisionmaking apparatus of the Bush and Obama Administrations, and on the ground in Iraq. He builds to the implication that the consequence of the group's effort was the replacement of one doctrine (air-land battle) with another (COIN). This took a herculean effort by a unique group of true believers to recalibrate the machine, but once accomplished, the machine could not get the entire job done. He excuses the leaders of the COIN movement by concluding that some wars are winnable (Iraq) and some are not (Afghanistan). Good as this tale is, I admit to feeling a "here we go again" exasperation about halfway through: more glorification of a certain set of people, chief among them General David Petraeus. Kaplan is guilty of marginalizing other leaders who were instrumental in developing and implementing COIN strategy. Two kinds of contributions were required to change the military: those who drove an intellectually rigorous process that required bureaucratic and political savvy; and those who implemented the policy in the field and then fed back necessary adaptations. The Insurgents emphasized the thinkers, not the doers. The overlap of the two sets is mostly limited to one man, David Petraeus--a conceptual thinker who starts with an understanding of the problem and the big ideas associated with it, values academia and multiple perspectives, is hyper-efficient in his habits, made it his job to master his role in the body politic, and has the personal fortitude to operationalize all of it. So I am able to put a better point on the exasperation expressed above: it is the rarity of the combination Petraeus embodies that damns the military culture, and so we have yet another author criticizing the dearth of creative thinking and courage among the military's ranks. Indeed, Kaplan cannot help but take jabs at the military as he chronicles the struggle it took to adapt. He says "only the most confident and nurtured young officer" would take on the Army establishment as Petreaus did with an article he ghost wrote for Galvin. He implies Nagl's retirement as a lieutenant colonel had to do with writing that the Army was not a learning organization. He characterizes the "Sosh" Department as comprised of officers who doubted the judgment of their superiors, implying they were correct to do so. …