Greg Jaffe writes in today's Wall Street Journal (alt link) about the intellectual battles gripping the U.S. Army as the force struggles to persevere in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fights revolve around fundamental questions of soldiering and leadership, like how to face emerging threats such as insurgencies, how to shape the force for "full spectrum" operations, and how to best select, train and promote Army leaders. Jaffe's piece suggests that these debates rival those which occurred after Vietnam, when a generation of officers argued similar questions as part of the Army's rebuilding in the 1970s and 1980s. The difference, of course, is that we're still at war, making these contemporary discussions somewhat unprecedented. According to the article:

Last December, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling attended a Purple Heart ceremony for soldiers injured in Iraq. As he watched the wounded troops collect their medals, the 41-year-old officer reflected on his two combat tours in Iraq.

He was frustrated at how slowly the Army had adjusted to the demands of guerrilla war, and ashamed he hadn't done more to push for change. By the end of the ceremony, he says, he could barely look the wounded troops in the eyes. Col. Yingling just had been chosen to lead a 540-soldier battalion. "I can't command like this," he recalls thinking.

He poured his thoughts into a blistering critique of the Army brass, "A Failure in Generalship," published last month in Armed Forces Journal, a nongovernment publication. "America's generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand," his piece argued.

The essay rocketed around the Army via email. The director of the Army's elite school for war planners scrapped his lesson plan for a day to discuss it. The commanding general at Fort Hood assembled about 200 captains in the chapel of that Texas base and delivered a speech intended to rebut it.

"I think [Col. Yingling] was speaking some truths that most of us talk about over beers," says Col. Matthew Moten, a history professor at West Point who also served in Iraq. "Very few of us have the courage or foolhardiness to put them in print."

The controversy over Col. Yingling's essay is part of a broader debate within the military over why the Army has struggled in Iraq, what it should look like going forward, and how it should be led. It's a fight being hashed out in the form of what one Pentagon official calls "failure narratives." Some of these explanations for the military's struggles in Iraq come through official channels. Others, like Col. Yingling's, are unofficial and show up in military journals and books.

The conflicting theories on Iraq reflect growing divisions within the military along generational lines, pitting young officers, exhausted by multiple Iraq tours and eager for change, against more conservative generals. Army and Air Force officers are also developing their own divergent explanations for Iraq. The Air Force narratives typically suggest the military should in the future avoid manpower-intensive guerrilla wars. Army officers counter that such fights are inevitable.

Jaffe goes on to write about the specific encounters which have taken place in the context of this larger battle over the Army's future. He writes how Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the Army's leading soldier-scholars, and the commander of the battalion at Fort Riley charged with training tomorrow's advisers, has proposed a new "adviser corps" for the U.S. military to work with foreign militaries in the future. That proposal has been soundly rejected by the powers that be, who have chosen instead to put their eggs in the conventional warfare basket. Jaffe also writes about the engagements between the Fort Hood commanding general and a group of captains:

At Fort Hood, Maj. Gen. Jeff Hammond, the top general at the sprawling base, summoned all of the captains to hear his response to Col. Yingling's critique. About 200 officers in their mid- to late-20s, most of them Iraq veterans, filled the pews and lined the walls of the base chapel. "I believe in our generals. They are dedicated, selfless servants," Gen. Hammond recalls saying. The 51-year-old officer told the young captains that Col. Yingling wasn't competent to judge generals because he had never been one. "He has never worn the shoes of a general," Gen. Hammond recalls saying.

The captains' reactions highlighted the growing gap between some junior officers and the generals. "If we are not qualified to judge, who is?" says one Iraq veteran who was at the meeting. Another officer in attendance says that he and his colleagues didn't want to hear a defense of the Army's senior officers. "We want someone at higher levels to take accountability for what went wrong in Iraq," he says.

Discourse and dissent are healthy for a military organization. As I wrote a few days ago, warfare is a complex endeavor where the common denominators are chance, uncertainty, and chaos. Vigorous discussion of core assumptions and strategies is critical; sharp criticism is essential for that discussion. The intellectual arrogance displayed thus far by America's caste of generals and senior Pentagon officials has been startling, and stunningly myopic. It virtually guarantees that we will adopt stale, inflexible strategies with zero chance of success.

When I've engaged senior leaders on these questions, I've gotten back answers which were some variation of "You don't understand, captain, because you haven't been there at my level." Quite right, I haven't. The closest I've come to that level is a year as a division planner, and a short tour in the Pentagon. My riposte? "Sir, you don't understand, because you haven't been there either."

Today's company-grade and field-grade officers have a perspective that most generals lack, because we've served in this war at the level where the rubber meets the road. (Cf. "What about the grunts?") But more important, today's generals refuse to acknowledge the basic truths that are known to any sergeant or junior officer who's served downrange. Often driven by political considerations and the machinations of civilian appointees, these generals have failed to adjust their assumptions to reflect these realities in the field. And in doing so, they have broken faith with today's generation of sergeants and officers, our sons and daughters whom we send into harm's way to fight our wars.

Some senior officers get it. Col. J.B. Burton, mentioned in Jaffe's article, penned a memo to his boss on the opinions and attitudes of his junior officers in an effort to explain why they're getting out in droves. Nagl, Yingling, and others within the Army's small intellectual community get it. But the mainline conventional leadership of the Army has a long way to go. To some extent, these intellectuals are waging an insurgency of their own, a fight against the entrenched and anachronistic norms, values and leaders of the Army. The odds are long, but the fight is worth it.

That quote from this New York Times article about a viewing party for Lifetime's new show Army Wives sums up so much about civil-military relations in America.

The article gives a generally good review to the show, passing on the views of several bona fide army wives at Fort Drum, the home of the Army's storied 10th Mountain Division, a unit which has seen much combat in the past 6 years. According to the group that watched the show, the series gets a great deal right, notwithstanding the inevitable Hollywood hiccups which are part of any film or TV show about the services:

Poor Denise Sherwood. Her nasty son smacks her around. And she just learned that the Blackhawk helicopter carrying her husband, Maj. Frank Sherwood, was shot down in Iraq. So maybe the real Army wives at this post near Syracuse, watching Denise on TV in the hit Lifetime drama, “Army Wives,” would show her some love, or at least cut her some slack?

Nah.

“Nobody answers the telephone that way,” one of them commented when Denise breathlessly picked up the receiver and said, “This is Major Sherwood’s wife.”

The eight women gathered here recently to watch Episode 4 of the new one-hour series said that identifying yourself by your husband’s rank would be like announcing his income, a definite no-no on the post.

Also strictly Hollywood, they agreed, was the scene of casually chic wives gathered at the Sherwood home, proffering sympathy and elegant home-baked goodies after the bad news. “We would just throw on some jeans and grab a bag of something,” said Amanda Downey, one of the real Army wives. “There are too many people in her house too. Usually just the close friends show up.”

Despite their critique of the show, the real Army wives are among an average of 3.6 million people who have made “Army Wives” the highest-rated series in Lifetime’s 23-year history. Shown Sunday nights at 10, the 13-episode series, which began on June 3, is shot in Charleston, S.C., at a fictional post called Fort Marshall and is based on the book “Army Wives: The Unwritten Code of Military Marriage” by Tanya Biank, herself an Army brat turned Army wife. Ms. Biank is now a consultant to the show.

Still, the real Army wives said, the plots often feel more likely to play out on Wisteria Lane (“Desperate Housewives” on ABC) than at this 107,000-acre post in upstate New York, which is home to 17,000 soldiers and their families (another 14,000 people) and has about 3,500 troops in Iraq . . .

I've watched a couple of episodes, and that's about my verdict too. The show captures some things right, like this great episode in the first scene showing a young army wife waiting with her kids at the base medical clinic, having a devil of a time getting seen by a doctor. But for the intervention of a colonel's wife, we're left with the impression that she may have never been seen. It captured the bureaucratic realities of military life well. But at the same time, the characters appear as caricatures of the real thing. In the real army, the corporal's wife and colonel's wife are far more interesting and nuanced than the stereotypes presented on the show. And the soldiers are too. Perhaps the best example of this is the show's treatment of Lt. Col. Joan Burton, apparently suffering from PTSD as the result of a recent deployment to Afghanistan. The show depicts her getting drunk and dancing lewdly on a bar, but it shows us very little of her descent, nor any of the context surrounding her depression and anxiety. The show goes for the easy caricatures and the easy plot formulas, and in doing so, fails to convey the depth and complexity underlying a number of important military issues.

The end result? Army Wives opens a valuable window into military life for the vast majority of this country which has no personal connection to the military. But it is a small window, and a tinted one. I fear that the show will do more to perpetuate negative and inaccurate stereotypes about the military than to help them.

Australian army officer and anthropologist Dave Kilcullen, adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad, published a note yesterday on the Small Wars Journal blog discussing the theory behind current operations in Iraq. It is probably the best single-source explanation I've seen for how and why we're doing what we're doing, such as the recent offensives in Baquba and the "Baghdad Belts." According to Lt. Col. Kilcullen:

These operations are qualitatively different from what we have done before. Our concept is to knock over several insurgent safe havens simultaneously, in order to prevent terrorists relocating their infrastructure from one to another, and to create an operational synergy between what we're doing in Baghdad and what's happening outside. Unlike on previous occasions, we don't plan to leave these areas once they’re secured. These ops will run over months, and the key activity is to stand up viable local security forces in partnership with Iraqi Army and Police, as well as political and economic programs, to permanently secure them. The really decisive activity will be police work, registration of the population and counterintelligence in these areas, to comb out the insurgent sleeper cells and political cells that have "gone quiet" as we moved in, but which will try to survive through the op and emerge later. This will take operational patience, and it will be intelligence-led, and Iraqi government-led. It will probably not make the news (the really important stuff rarely does) but it will be the truly decisive action.

When we speak of "clearing" an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation. If we don't get every enemy cell in the initial operation, that's OK. The point of the operations is to lift the pall of fear from population groups that have been intimidated and exploited by terrorists to date, then win them over and work with them in partnership to clean out the cells that remain – as has happened in Al Anbar Province and can happen elsewhere in Iraq as well.

The "terrain" we are clearing is human terrain, not physical terrain. It is about marginalizing al Qa’ida, Shi’a extremist militias, and the other terrorist groups from the population they prey on. This is why claims that “80% of AQ leadership have fled” don’t overly disturb us: the aim is not to kill every last AQ leader, but rather to drive them off the population and keep them off, so that we can work with the community to prevent their return.

This is not some sort of kind-hearted, soft approach, as some fire-breathing polemicists have claimed (funnily enough, those who urge us to “just kill more bad guys” usually do so from a safe distance). It is not about being “nice” to the population and hoping they will somehow see us as the “good guys” and stop supporting insurgents. On the contrary, it is based on a hard-headed recognition of certain basic facts . . .

The rest is worth a read. I'm on my way out the door, but hope to update this post later with some commentary.

Update I: Fred Kagan, the AEI scholar who laid the intellectual foundation for the surge, further explains the strategy in this testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

On today's Wall Street Journal editorial page, editor James Taranto pens an essay against the growing movement to provide some measure of due process to the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. His argument is not a new one — that providing legal protections to captured enemy fighters would undermine our efforts in the war on terrorism by frustrating interrogation efforts and permitting them to wage war against us in our courts. That particular argument has some merit, and I think that reasoned debate on these questions is important. But Mr. Taranto takes the argument entirely too far with this conclusion:

Colin Powell would go even further. "I would close Guantanamo, not tomorrow, but this afternoon," the former secretary of state told NBC's Tim Russert earlier this month. "I'd get rid of the military commission system and use established procedures in federal law or in the manual for courts-martial."

Mr. Powell claimed that "I would not let any of [the detainees] go," but his proposal would inevitably have that effect. Once inside the criminal justice system, detainees would become defendants with full constitutional rights, including the right to be charged or released, the right to exclude tainted evidence, and the right to be freed unless found guilty of a specific crime beyond a reasonable doubt.

Legitimate prisoners of war enjoy no such rights. The primary purpose of holding enemy combatants during wartime is not punitive but preventive--to keep them off the battlefield. No one disputes that a country at war can hold POWs without charge for the duration of hostilities. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority in Hamdan, reaffirmed the government's authority to do the same with the unlawful combatants at Guantanamo.

By granting constitutional protections to detainees, Mr. Powell's proposal would endanger the lives of American civilians. It would also afford preferential treatment to enemy fighters who defy the rules of war. This would make a mockery of international humanitarian law. [emphasis added]

In the long run, it could also imperil the civil liberties of Americans. Leniency toward detainees is on the table today only because al Qaeda has so far failed to strike America since 9/11. If it succeeded again, public pressure for harsher measures would be hard for politicians to resist. And if enemy combatants had been transferred to the criminal justice system, those measures would be much more likely to diminish the rights of citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism.

By keeping terrorists out of America, Guantanamo protects Americans' physical safety. By keeping them out of our justice system, it also protects our freedom.

Mr. Powell "would endanger the lives of American civilians"? Really? I have a really hard time believing that this lifelong soldier, statesman and public servant would pursue a policy that might have that result. It has long been my understanding that Powell spoke from a position of realism on this issue — not some hidden desire to help the enemy. In opposing the administration's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions at Guantanamo, Powell stressed the impact of that decision on our national security, and specifically on the future Geneva protections for our troops. He felt, as I do, that taking a narrow, cribbed view of these international laws would undermine our security in the long run, and that America would be stronger if it continued to lead the world on issues of law in war. Powell's recent comments suggesting that we close Guantanamo should also be viewed in this context. Powell is a hard-bitten realist, and always has been. His opinions on Gitmo relect a cost-benefit calculation about the benefits of keeping this facility open versus the costs to American interests of doing so.

This attack on Gen. Powell echoes the baseless attacks of Sen. Joe McCarthy on retired Gen. George C. Marshall, who McCarthy called a traitor and an instrument of the Soviet conspiracy. Neither, of course, was true. Marshall earned this criticism by advising President Harry Truman to sack Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and by limiting the scope of the Korean War. He undertook both decisions because he felt that they were in the national security interests of the United States. History proved Marshall to be absolutely correct on both accounts. But McCarthy saw things differently, choosing to attack Marshall personally and accuse him of helping the Communists, at a time when such invective carried a great deal of weight. Taranto's argument today fits in this mold; yet another charge that critics of American detention and interrogation policy are friends of the enemy. And just as we rejected McCarthy's rhetoric then, we should reject Taranto's today.

The American Interest's latest issue explores that subject in a pair of essays in its July/August issue. According to retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, the answer is no — America's warrior-leaders need more practical education and experience, but they do not need to soften themselves and their minds in civilian universities. On the other side, America's leading soldier-scholar, Gen. David Petraeus, argues convincingly that smarter soldiers and leaders make better ones. Towards that end, he makes a powerful case for why the U.S. military should invest in itself by sending its officers and NCOs to college and grad school.

The most powerful tool any soldier carries is not his weapon but his mind. These days, and for the days ahead as far as we can see, what soldiers at all ranks know is liable to be at least as important to their success as what they can physically do. Some key questions before the U.S. military in changing times therefore must be: How do we define the best military education for the U.S. armed forces, and what are the best ways to impart that education? What should be the ideal relationship between soldiering and the schoolhouse?

This is a vast and complex subject, involving many different skill sets in various settings. I want to focus here on just one aspect of that subject: Do military officers benefit from attending a civilian graduate school after having learned their trade as warfighters and during a period in their careers that permits them to spend a year or two “away from troops?” The short answer is yes (while noting that we must, again, first focus on being competent in our warfighting skills). The benefits of civilian education are substantial, and I have been and remain a strong proponent of such opportunities for officers. I have applauded vigorously as the U.S. Army has begun implementing a new program to allow several hundred officers from the so-called basic branches—infantry, armor, field artillery and so on—to attend civilian graduate schools each year, with full funding, and to then be able to rejoin a tactical unit without having to first do an academic or staff tour that “employs” the skills they’ve gained in graduate school, as was the case in the past.

There are at least six reasons that civilian graduate schooling is valuable for our officers. The first and most important is that a stint at graduate school takes military officers out of their intellectual comfort zones. Such experiences are critical to the development of the flexible, adaptable, creative thinkers who are so important to operations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Warfighting must certainly remain the primary focus of military leaders. However, as the U.S. Army’s new leadership manual explains, our officers need to be capable of more than that. They need to be “pentathlete leaders”—individuals who, metaphorically speaking, are not just sprinters or shot putters but can do it all. We need officers comfortable not just with major combat operations but with operations conducted throughout the middle- and lower-ends of the spectrum of conflict, as well.

Sorry Ralph. Although I think you make some good points with respect to the shortcomings of professional military education in today's force, you miss the larger points here. Game, set and match to Gen. Petraeus.