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By Root 2151 0

also took a toll on equipment. Humvees, for example, were normally driven about eight thousand miles a year in peacetime exercises. Some of them were now being driven forty thousand miles a year. Add to that the fact that the Humvee was never intended to be an armored vehicle. It was designed as a soft-sided, all-purpose vehicle for the military, but because of the IED threat in Iraq, we put special armor on many of them to protect the troops. A Humvee without armor weighs about 6,500 pounds, and that’s the amount of weight its transmission and suspension systems were designed for. When we up-armored them, as we had to do, we added another three to four thousand pounds. The wear and tear was significant, and that meant significant additional cost to repair and replace equipment.

When the chiefs argued that now was not the time to surge forces, I think that part of their objective was to get the notion across to the president that if he was going to order a surge in troops, he was going to have to make a significantly larger investment in our military. It was a point well taken, and in his next budget, the president included funding to increase the size of both the army and the Marine Corps.

One argument the chiefs made that didn’t go far was the notion that we ought not commit more forces to Iraq because we needed to maintain a reserve force to deploy in the event of an unforeseen contingency somewhere else in the world. The president wasn’t persuaded. He told them his priority was to win the war we were fighting, not hold back out of concern for some potential future war.

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THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD, Jack Keane brought important perspective to the matter of what our forces could bear and how far we could push the chiefs. He knew that they would be legitimately concerned about the stress on the force, but he also pointed out that in an all-out global War on Terror, you do what you have to do to win. If you’ve got to go to fifteen-month deployments or eighteen-month deployments or stop-loss orders for the entire force or doubling the size of the force, whatever you’ve got to do you do because the one thing you can’t afford is defeat. With thirty-seven years of service in the army and his experience as vice chief of staff, he was for me personally a real anchor and a source of wisdom. His advice carried a good deal of weight. His view that it was absolutely possible to do what needed to be done without breaking the force went a long way toward giving me and other policymakers a sense that a surge was doable.

THE PRESIDENT WANTED THE new secretary of defense, Bob Gates, to have a chance to visit Iraq and meet with Generals Casey and Abizaid before any public announcement of a new war strategy. After Gates returned from Iraq, the National Security Council gathered at the president’s ranch in Crawford on December 28, 2006. Bob explained that General Casey had agreed to a surge, but that he wanted no more than two brigades, with additional brigades in the pipeline for deployment if needed. This looked like the kind of compromise solution we had been trying to avoid, and the president decided against it.

By this time, he had also decided on new military leadership in Iraq. He was going to make General Casey army chief of staff and nominate General David Petraeus to replace him. I thought Petraeus was a superb choice, tough, bright, and competent. Jack Keane, who didn’t offer praise lightly, was one of his biggest fans. The two had been close since 1991, when they had been watching a training exercise at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and a high-velocity round had accidentally struck Petraeus in the chest. Keane stayed by him, helicoptering with Petraeus to the Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, where a cardiothoracic surgeon named Bill Frist—who would later become Senate majority leader—operated on him for nearly six hours.

Petraeus made it clear that he needed five brigades. So did the general whom the president was nominating to be second in command in Iraq, Ray Odierno, a brilliant, no-nonsense army three-star who