A Most Unexpected Outcome

According to Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, insurgents usually win because the counter-insurgents get demoralized; time works for the insurgents in that way. According to Martin, there are only two approaches that work by deliberately circumventing the process of demoralization. The first was the British approach in Northern Ireland of defending the population against the insurgents by interposing the troops between the bad guys and the civilians. This takes tremendous forebearance, political will and military discipline. At the other end of the spectrum is Hafez Assad’s massacre in Hama back in 1982, in which he pounded the city into rubble then sent in his troops to kill anything that survived (end of insurgency). Martin insists that the first method is beyond most armies, the second not politically acceptable except to totalitarian regimes. Most countries choose a middle course, which, like all half-measures is doomed to fail. Prior to Petraeus, the U.S. was pursuing just such half-measures, as characterized by our two offensives against Falluja and our whack-a-mole approach to pacifying the country. Conservatives who claimed we were not ruthless enough chose one of two approaches. Petraeus’ counter-insurgency doctrine adopted the other. Petraeus’ great achievement is not only formulating the doctrine, but training a force capable of implementing it, and then overseeing the operations that did implement it. To military historians, this was a most unexpected outcome, given past U.S. history in counter-insurgency operations, and the Army’s historical proclivity for firepower-based solutions to tactical and operational problems (“Never send a man where you can send a shell”). After Petraeus, all credit is due to the troops and to their commanders at the company, battalion and brigade level. This is, without a doubt, the finest, best motivated, most highly trained army in the history of the United States. People will look back on this with awe.