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

by Fred Kaplan

As a short-term measure, the pair recommended that Petraeus, whose tour in Mosul was almost up, be put in charge of the program to train Iraqi security forces. That idea was approved.

But the unexpected star of the show turned out to be a thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant colonel from the Australian army named David Kilcullen.

(Most of these generals, in turn, wondered if Rumsfeld didn’t grasp the American officer corps’s post-MacArthur allegiance to the principle of civilian control, which made them disinclined to talk back to a secretary of defense.)

Is this a rule or tradition?

“every army of liberation has a half-life before it becomes an army of occupation”

Kevin Bergner, the deputy commander of US forces in northwestern Iraq, including Mosul. A former public-affairs officer at West

the United States hadn’t used its power—its half million troops and tens of billions of dollars in aid—as “leverage” to make the local leaders institute reforms and deal more effectively with the threat they faced.

“Lookit!” he said, pounding a nearby table. “My job is not to deal with this people thing! My job is to kill the enemy!”

In a nutshell, this is what the book is about.

There was a war going on—two wars, if you counted Afghanistan—and this was the Department of Defense. Why was almost nobody else working long hours?

Pointers; they were, in fact, all autodidacts.

The long run would be up to the Iraqis. And that was the problem.

The real problem

but he’d also come up in the school of thought, common among soldiers, even intellectual ones, that his job wasn’t to make policy but merely to carry it out in a way that minimized the pain and suffering.

Widespread thinking?

A glance at a map, a few villages, or some key passages from Galula would have revealed that Afghanistan and COIN made an unlikely match.

Fail

But both tugged on technology as an alluring anesthetic that numbed the senses to the pain of warfare:

Sad

This was the dark side of counterinsurgency, but it had also been seen by its practitioners as an essential side.

The dark side