Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [82]
Yet perceptions were not necessarily immutable, the young Petraeus surmised. Changing the way that a war was perceived—whether within the inner circle of power or in the eyes of the public—could be tantamount to changing reality itself. In a time of crisis, the soldier who demonstrated a capacity to alter perceptions might well parlay military authority into influence extending well beyond the narrow realm of military affairs. This describes the central achievement of General Petraeus in Iraq some twenty years after Major Petraeus claimed his Princeton degree.
In 2005, as a three-star general commanding the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Petraeus found himself in a position to act on the insights derived from his study of Vietnam. The CAC commander is to the army what the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is to the Roman Catholic Church: the chief guardian of orthodoxy, charged with ensuring conformity to Truth. Yet Petraeus consciously set out to overturn orthodoxy and promulgate an alternative version of truth, consisting of ideas long regarded as rank heresy. More specifically, in collaboration with Lt. Gen. James Mattis, a like-minded marine, he launched a crash program to revise and republish the army’s counterinsurgency manual, offering it as the corrective to all the frustrations that soldiers and marines were encountering in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Washington, Rumsfeld was still counseling patience. Out on the plains of Kansas, Petraeus had concluded that patience was just another word for incremental, inexorable failure.
FM 3-24, to employ the army’s designation for the new manual, appeared in December 2006. Rarely has a military publication garnered such instantaneous and widespread public attention. Within weeks of publication it had been downloaded 1.5 million times.12 In a matter of months, a prestigious university press rushed into print a paperback edition, adding for the benefit of civilian readers an interpretive commentary elucidating on the significance of this doctrinal rediscovery. Petraeus himself provided a glowing blurb for what was, in effect, his own book: “Surely a manual that’s on the bedside table of the president, vice president, secretary of defense, 21 of 25 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and many others deserves a place at your bedside too.”13
What was all the fuss about?
“This publication’s purpose,” FM 3-24 began, “is to help prepare Army and Marine Corps leaders to conduct COIN operations anywhere in the world.” Although acknowledging that insurgencies have been around for centuries, Petraeus’s manual argued that an especially malignant variant, “one that seeks to impose revolutionary change worldwide,” afflicted the present age. Al Qaeda, which “seeks to transform the Islamic world,” offered but one example of an insurgent movement fired by vast global aspirations. Countering this threat demanded a comparably expansive riposte, “a global strategic response, one that addresses the array of linked resources and conflicts that sustain these movements while tactically addressing the local grievances that feed them.” In short, when the manual referred to the “conduct of COIN operations anywhere in the world,” the word anywhere was synonymous with everywhere.14
No doubt the manual’s authors intended this statement to be taken at face value, even though FM 3-24 offered no estimates on the cost or duration of the proposed global response. Yet Petraeus’s purpose in revising U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine was not to evaluate COIN but to sell it.
As such, the text was conducive to multiple interpretations. At one level, FM 3-24 could serve as a handbook. At a deeper level, it was an exercise in deconstruction, dismantling hallowed conceptions of warfare while