The Reaper
03-17-2008, 14:17
Newsweek
March 24, 2008
Scions Of The Surge
Five years on, the war is transforming the American officer corps.
By Babak Dehghanpisheh and Evan Thomas
A doctor's son, Tim Wright was a Latin scholar with a 3.8 average in high school. Admitted to Princeton, he chose to go to West Point instead. "People looked at me like I had a third eye," Wright says, but he was drawn to the discipline of the U.S. Military Academy. He became a squared-away soldier, demanding of his troops yet sleeping and eating with them, and sharing their privations and dangers. His gung-ho attitude earned him the nickname "Captain America" from some of his grunts, half in jest, half out of respect.
But Wright is not the warrior he expected to be or that he was first trained to be. When he became a young infantry officer out of West Point in 2000, he entered an Army whose mission was to win wars by overwhelming force. This was the Army that blasted its way into Baghdad in less than three weeks in the spring of 2003. It is also the Army whose guns-blazing tactics helped fuel an angry insurgency, and that quickly became bogged down—worn, bloodied and baffled—by IEDs and street fighting in Iraq.
Wright, 30, was a captain in Baghdad last spring when the situation seemed bleakest. Walking down a street in the tormented neighborhood of Bayaa, chatting with a private named Oscar Sauceda,
Wright watched as Sauceda was hit in the head by a sniper's bullet. "He was dead before he hit the ground," Wright says, choking up at the memory. The captain wondered if he had failed his soldier by not clearing a nearby building. "That's the tough thing about this job," says Wright, blinking back tears. "If you f––– up, sometimes people die." Less than three weeks later, one of his company's Humvees was hit by a roadside bomb. Wright's staff sergeant, Matt Lammers, lost both legs and his left arm. Wright was crestfallen when he saw Lammers in the hospital. Baghdad seemed hopeless then. "It makes you think," Wright says, recalling his feelings at the time. "Is this place too far gone?"
Many Americans were asking that question last spring and summer. While it's too soon to say Iraq has turned the corner, the violence in Baghdad and most of the country has since declined precipitously. Much of the credit has gone to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander who has changed the way the U.S. Army fights. "You can't kill your way out of an insurgency," Petraeus told NEWSWEEK, in an interview in his Baghdad headquarters last month. He has moved soldiers out of their secure megabases and into small outposts deep inside once alien and hostile neighborhoods, and he has ordered his men out of their armored convoys. "Walk … Stop by, don't drive by," says Petraeus, reading from a "guidance" he is drafting for his soldiers. The objective, he repeats over and over, is no longer to take a hill or storm a citadel, but to win over the people.
But this new way of war needs a new kind of warrior, and it needs tens of thousands of them. Five years into the longest conflict the U.S. military has fought since Vietnam, young officers like Tim Wright have been blooded by multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've learned, often on their own, operating with unprecedented independence, the intricacies of Muslim cultures. Faced with ineffective central governments, they have acted as mayors, mediators, cops, civil engineers, usually in appalling surroundings. Most recently, and hardest of all, they've had to reach out and ally themselves with men who have tried and often succeeded in killing their own soldiers. Brought up in rigid, flag-waving warrior cultures that taught right from wrong, black from white, they've had to learn to operate amid moral ambiguity, to acknowledge the legitimate aspirations of their enemies.
It is hard to overstate the achievement of this Petraeus Generation of officers, but their success is terribly fragile. Their newest allies—some of them former outlaws, insurgents, terrorists—may yet betray their trust. Living among them, walking the streets every day, is critical to maintaining their loyalty, yet with each passing month the pressure to draw down troops is likely to grow. And while the skills these American officers have gained are crucial in murky conflicts like Iraq, they are not universally valued or trusted within the Pentagon. Petraeus has fought many battles with his bosses—including CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon, who resigned last week—over getting the resources needed to make his counterinsurgency strategy work. As his heirs move up the ranks, they will face similar struggles over which wars America chooses to wage in the future—and the way the Army fights them.
Many have already had to do battle with superiors who have been slow learners, if not clueless. Wright, a tall, square-jawed athlete who looks a little like Jack Kerouac, is nothing if not a thoughtful warrior. He grew up in a nonmilitary family in Maine; his older brother now works for an NGO resettling African refugees, his sister for the NBA. At West Point, he majored in American history and focused part of his research on Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine senator who spoke out against McCarthyism. There at the Academy, as well as at the Infantry Officer Basic Course and the more advanced Ranger School, Wright was trained to pursue and defeat an enemy using technology and superior firepower. But he learned the limits of that training in Afghanistan in 2004.
For three months, Wright and his fellow soldiers fruitlessly searched an area the size of Vermont for Taliban insurgents. "Chasing guys through the mountains of Afghanistan at 10,000 feet didn't [work]. The intel people always talk about 'ratlines'," Wright says, wriggling his fingers. "The 'ratlines' are bulls––t. Why would a guy hike over a snowy mountain with a bag of IEDs when they can drive it in a truck?" Wright realized that what he needed was an ally who could identify the jihadists who were right in front of him.
For weeks, Wright and his fellow soldiers had been hunting for a militant leader named Jan Baz. Finally Wright's boss, Lt. Col. Walter Piatt, decided that if they couldn't kill or capture the fugitive, they'd co-opt him. Piatt asked the local Afghan governor to set up a face-to-face meeting, where the American colonel offered Jan Baz the job of local police chief. The militant, eager to cement his authority in the area, accepted. "Was there some shadiness going on there?" Wright asks. "Yes. But it worked." After Jan Baz was put on the American payroll, attacks dropped.
When Wright wrapped up his tour in 2005, he wrote an article in Infantry Magazine, an Army publication, criticizing the traditional "light infantry" tactics that had flopped in Afghanistan. He recommended more-flexible approaches, like mixing with the locals and (more implied than directly stated) buying off the enemy. When Petraeus drafted his counterinsurgency doctrine in 2006, he was able to draw on the experiences of resourceful frontline officers like Piatt and Wright. "All the stuff in the Petraeus manual, we had kind of figured it out there [in Afghanistan]," says Wright. "It was all the stuff we had seen work on the ground."
American officers learned very similar lessons in battling the Viet Cong. But much of that knowledge was simply lost. "It's said we fought that war nine times, a year at a time," says Petraeus, noting that because they had been drafted rather than volunteered, many combat-hardened troops left the Army as soon as their yearlong tours in Vietnam were up. By contrast, with the Army stretched thin and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragging on, soldiers like Wright find themselves heading back into the fight for a second (or third or fourth) tour. "They have a level of experience that I don't think our Army has had at that rank certainly since Vietnam, and maybe not even then," says Petraeus.
Petraeus has institutionalized that knowledge. Herding a team of researchers at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, he was able to get his manual written and approved about three years after the invasion of Iraq, lightning speed in Pentagon time. But even Petraeus says that the much-lauded document can provide only principles to follow. The hard work is still being done in the streets of Baghdad. "What they're dealing with is much more complex and much more nuanced than what we were trained to do when I was a captain," he says. "You have to understand not just what we call the military terrain ... the high ground and low ground. It's about understanding the human terrain, really understanding it."
March 24, 2008
Scions Of The Surge
Five years on, the war is transforming the American officer corps.
By Babak Dehghanpisheh and Evan Thomas
A doctor's son, Tim Wright was a Latin scholar with a 3.8 average in high school. Admitted to Princeton, he chose to go to West Point instead. "People looked at me like I had a third eye," Wright says, but he was drawn to the discipline of the U.S. Military Academy. He became a squared-away soldier, demanding of his troops yet sleeping and eating with them, and sharing their privations and dangers. His gung-ho attitude earned him the nickname "Captain America" from some of his grunts, half in jest, half out of respect.
But Wright is not the warrior he expected to be or that he was first trained to be. When he became a young infantry officer out of West Point in 2000, he entered an Army whose mission was to win wars by overwhelming force. This was the Army that blasted its way into Baghdad in less than three weeks in the spring of 2003. It is also the Army whose guns-blazing tactics helped fuel an angry insurgency, and that quickly became bogged down—worn, bloodied and baffled—by IEDs and street fighting in Iraq.
Wright, 30, was a captain in Baghdad last spring when the situation seemed bleakest. Walking down a street in the tormented neighborhood of Bayaa, chatting with a private named Oscar Sauceda,
Wright watched as Sauceda was hit in the head by a sniper's bullet. "He was dead before he hit the ground," Wright says, choking up at the memory. The captain wondered if he had failed his soldier by not clearing a nearby building. "That's the tough thing about this job," says Wright, blinking back tears. "If you f––– up, sometimes people die." Less than three weeks later, one of his company's Humvees was hit by a roadside bomb. Wright's staff sergeant, Matt Lammers, lost both legs and his left arm. Wright was crestfallen when he saw Lammers in the hospital. Baghdad seemed hopeless then. "It makes you think," Wright says, recalling his feelings at the time. "Is this place too far gone?"
Many Americans were asking that question last spring and summer. While it's too soon to say Iraq has turned the corner, the violence in Baghdad and most of the country has since declined precipitously. Much of the credit has gone to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander who has changed the way the U.S. Army fights. "You can't kill your way out of an insurgency," Petraeus told NEWSWEEK, in an interview in his Baghdad headquarters last month. He has moved soldiers out of their secure megabases and into small outposts deep inside once alien and hostile neighborhoods, and he has ordered his men out of their armored convoys. "Walk … Stop by, don't drive by," says Petraeus, reading from a "guidance" he is drafting for his soldiers. The objective, he repeats over and over, is no longer to take a hill or storm a citadel, but to win over the people.
But this new way of war needs a new kind of warrior, and it needs tens of thousands of them. Five years into the longest conflict the U.S. military has fought since Vietnam, young officers like Tim Wright have been blooded by multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've learned, often on their own, operating with unprecedented independence, the intricacies of Muslim cultures. Faced with ineffective central governments, they have acted as mayors, mediators, cops, civil engineers, usually in appalling surroundings. Most recently, and hardest of all, they've had to reach out and ally themselves with men who have tried and often succeeded in killing their own soldiers. Brought up in rigid, flag-waving warrior cultures that taught right from wrong, black from white, they've had to learn to operate amid moral ambiguity, to acknowledge the legitimate aspirations of their enemies.
It is hard to overstate the achievement of this Petraeus Generation of officers, but their success is terribly fragile. Their newest allies—some of them former outlaws, insurgents, terrorists—may yet betray their trust. Living among them, walking the streets every day, is critical to maintaining their loyalty, yet with each passing month the pressure to draw down troops is likely to grow. And while the skills these American officers have gained are crucial in murky conflicts like Iraq, they are not universally valued or trusted within the Pentagon. Petraeus has fought many battles with his bosses—including CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon, who resigned last week—over getting the resources needed to make his counterinsurgency strategy work. As his heirs move up the ranks, they will face similar struggles over which wars America chooses to wage in the future—and the way the Army fights them.
Many have already had to do battle with superiors who have been slow learners, if not clueless. Wright, a tall, square-jawed athlete who looks a little like Jack Kerouac, is nothing if not a thoughtful warrior. He grew up in a nonmilitary family in Maine; his older brother now works for an NGO resettling African refugees, his sister for the NBA. At West Point, he majored in American history and focused part of his research on Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine senator who spoke out against McCarthyism. There at the Academy, as well as at the Infantry Officer Basic Course and the more advanced Ranger School, Wright was trained to pursue and defeat an enemy using technology and superior firepower. But he learned the limits of that training in Afghanistan in 2004.
For three months, Wright and his fellow soldiers fruitlessly searched an area the size of Vermont for Taliban insurgents. "Chasing guys through the mountains of Afghanistan at 10,000 feet didn't [work]. The intel people always talk about 'ratlines'," Wright says, wriggling his fingers. "The 'ratlines' are bulls––t. Why would a guy hike over a snowy mountain with a bag of IEDs when they can drive it in a truck?" Wright realized that what he needed was an ally who could identify the jihadists who were right in front of him.
For weeks, Wright and his fellow soldiers had been hunting for a militant leader named Jan Baz. Finally Wright's boss, Lt. Col. Walter Piatt, decided that if they couldn't kill or capture the fugitive, they'd co-opt him. Piatt asked the local Afghan governor to set up a face-to-face meeting, where the American colonel offered Jan Baz the job of local police chief. The militant, eager to cement his authority in the area, accepted. "Was there some shadiness going on there?" Wright asks. "Yes. But it worked." After Jan Baz was put on the American payroll, attacks dropped.
When Wright wrapped up his tour in 2005, he wrote an article in Infantry Magazine, an Army publication, criticizing the traditional "light infantry" tactics that had flopped in Afghanistan. He recommended more-flexible approaches, like mixing with the locals and (more implied than directly stated) buying off the enemy. When Petraeus drafted his counterinsurgency doctrine in 2006, he was able to draw on the experiences of resourceful frontline officers like Piatt and Wright. "All the stuff in the Petraeus manual, we had kind of figured it out there [in Afghanistan]," says Wright. "It was all the stuff we had seen work on the ground."
American officers learned very similar lessons in battling the Viet Cong. But much of that knowledge was simply lost. "It's said we fought that war nine times, a year at a time," says Petraeus, noting that because they had been drafted rather than volunteered, many combat-hardened troops left the Army as soon as their yearlong tours in Vietnam were up. By contrast, with the Army stretched thin and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragging on, soldiers like Wright find themselves heading back into the fight for a second (or third or fourth) tour. "They have a level of experience that I don't think our Army has had at that rank certainly since Vietnam, and maybe not even then," says Petraeus.
Petraeus has institutionalized that knowledge. Herding a team of researchers at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, he was able to get his manual written and approved about three years after the invasion of Iraq, lightning speed in Pentagon time. But even Petraeus says that the much-lauded document can provide only principles to follow. The hard work is still being done in the streets of Baghdad. "What they're dealing with is much more complex and much more nuanced than what we were trained to do when I was a captain," he says. "You have to understand not just what we call the military terrain ... the high ground and low ground. It's about understanding the human terrain, really understanding it."