Petraeus's promotions

A certain type of experience may now be the COIN of the US Army realm, according to Fred Kaplan:

Last November, when Gen. David Petraeus was named to chair the promotion board that picks the Army's new one-star generals, the move was seen as, potentially, the first rumble of a seismic shift in the core of the military establishment.

The selections were announced in July, and they have more than fulfilled the promise. They mark the beginnings, perhaps, of the cultural change that many Army reformers have been awaiting for years.

Promotion systems, in any large organization, are designed to perpetuate the dominant culture. The officers in charge tend to promote underlings whose styles and career paths resemble their own.

Most of today's Army generals rose through the ranks during the Cold War as armor, infantry, or artillery officers who were trained to fight large-scale, head-to-head battles against enemies of comparable strength—for instance, the Soviet army as its tanks plowed across the East-West German border.

The problem, as many junior officers have been writing [my link - MC] over the last few years, is that this sort of training has little relevance for the wars of today and, likely, tomorrow—the "asymmetric wars" and counterinsurgency campaigns that the U.S. military has actually been fighting for the last 20 years in Bosnia, Panama, Haiti, and Somalia, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

...Among the 40 newly named one-star generals are Sean MacFarland, commander of the unit that brought order to Ramadi; Steve Townsend, who cleared and held Baqubah; Michael Garrett, who commanded the infantry brigade that helped turn around the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad; Stephen Fogarty, the intelligence officer in Afghanistan; Colleen McGuire, an officer in the military police (a branch of the service that almost never makes generals). At least eight special-operations officers are on the list (though not all of them are identified as such), as well as the unit commanders of various "light" forces—in Stryker light-armor brigades or the 10th Mountain Division—that have tended to be ignored by the Army's "heavy"-leaning armor and artillery chiefs.

Almost all these new generals have had multiple tours of duty leading soldiers in battle. In other words, they have a depth of knowledge about asymmetric warfare that the generals at the start of the Iraq war did not. And many of them were promoted straight from their combat commands. That is, they didn't have to scurry through the usual bureaucratic maze...

Secretary of Defense Gates should be most pleased:

Gates Sees Terrorism Remaining Enemy No. 1

New Defense Strategy Shifts Focus From Conventional Warfare

I recently encountered a US Army Colonel, just promoted, with recent experience training the Iraqi Army. Exceptionally sharp, broadly educated, frank and funny (like quite a few Canadian officers). Just the ticket for the future, I'd say.

Mark C.

Update: David Ignatius thinks that under the next administration--either party--Mr Gates could be usefully employed to lead a commission aimed at: 1) modernizing the US national security structure to deal with nation-building; and, 2) reforming (effectively this time) the structure of US intelligence.

Posted by markc at August 6, 2008 06:13 PM