Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [81]
This insight triggered a campaign within the officer corps to displace military practices devised for wars between armies in favor of techniques suitable for what some had begun to call “war amongst the people”—a phrase coined by Gen. Sir Rupert Smith, a British officer who had commanded NATO forces in the Balkans. “Our conflicts tend to be timeless,” Smith wrote in his book The Utility of Force, “even endless.”7 Sir Rupert thereby put his finger on one key element of the gradually emerging conventional wisdom in the U.S. military: An officer corps that had once resolved to avoid protracted war at all costs now contemplated an era of conflict without end.
The commitment of the post-Vietnam officer corps to the sacred trinity had been contingent on expectations that political leaders, having assimilated the “lessons” of Vietnam, would employ armed force prudently, even sparingly. As those expectations went by the board and as peace became the exception and war the rule, from within the officer corps itself came an urge to counterinsurge.
Chief among the proponents of this intraservice insurgency was Gen. David Petraeus, an ambitious soldier who first came to public attention as a media-savvy, politically adroit, and very successful division commander during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (En route to Baghdad, confiding in a receptive Washington Post reporter, Petraeus posed what proved to be the most elusive yet emblematic question of the decade: “Tell me how this ends.”)8
Petraeus was a gifted officer, identified early in his career as someone meant for big things. Among his most prominent gifts were those of a courtier: The young Petraeus displayed a considerable talent for cultivating influential figures, both in and out of uniform, who might prove useful in advancing his own prospects. And he was nothing if not smart. On his way to the top, he had acquired a Princeton Ph.D., choosing as the subject of his dissertation “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.” Writing in the mid-1980s, Major Petraeus hewed to the then-existing military consensus, and so questioned the wisdom of any U.S. “involvement in counterinsurgencies unless specific, perhaps unlikely, circumstances obtain—i.e., domestic public support, the promise of a brief campaign, and freedom to employ whatever force is necessary to achieve rapid victory.”
“In light of such criteria,” Petraeus wrote, “committing U.S. units to counterinsurgencies appears to be a very problematic proposition, difficult to conclude before domestic support erodes and costly enough to threaten the well-being of all America’s military forces (and hence the country’s national security), not just those involved in the actual counterinsurgency.”9
For Petraeus, then, the key lesson of Vietnam reduced to this: When the United States went to war, time—the overriding necessity of securing a decisive outcome in short order—was of the essence. The American people demanded prompt results and American political leaders were hard-pressed to resist such demands. Petraeus put it this way: “Recognizing the perishability of public support for military action abroad, the post-Vietnam military have come to regard time as the principal limit in limited wars.”10
Domestic support for Vietnam had eroded because the public sensed that things were going badly, a perception that hardened as violence escalated from one year to the next. When, in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive, President Johnson himself bought into that perception, all was lost. Whether or not the United States had succeeded militarily in thwarting the communist offensive was beside the point. “Perceptions of reality,” wrote Petraeus, “more so than objective reality, are crucial to the decisions