Armed Humanitarians (24 page)

These groups often had an adversarial relationship with the military, but Sewall managed to persuade senior officers to sit at the same table with human rights advocates. Getting academics and representatives of nongovernmental organizations to show up was also a struggle. Tyler Moselle, a research associate at the Carr Center, helped Sewall work the phones to persuade nonmilitary participants to attend the conference. “We open up the window and try to rush as many people in the room and then close the window,” he said.

The role of the Kennedy School of Government was particularly important because the military and the scholarly worlds had been at odds since the Vietnam War, and the estrangement and mistrust had continued for decades. Introduction of an all-volunteer military widened the rift, as did policies like the military's ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in uniform. The Bush administration's disastrous preemptive war against Iraq was not particularly popular with academics nor with human rights advocates, either. But Sewall and Moselle believed they were on a mission; they justified the Carr Center's close collaboration with the military as working within the system to minimize the use of force and reduce civilian harm. When people asked Moselle to describe his job, he liked to say, “We try to humanize the military.”

But it was a two-way street. Petraeus and the counterinsurgents also needed the imprimatur of the Kennedy School. They wanted to reach policy wonks, think-tankers, and academics who would help shape the debate about armed nation building. Equally important, they wanted to cultivate prominent journalists. Peter Maass, the journalist who had written a thoughtful profile of Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl for the
New York Times Magazine
in 2004, shared a panel with Kurilla at the Carr Center's 2005 conference on irregular warfare.

It was easy to understand why journalists gravitated to articulate officers with Ph.D.s such as Petraeus and Nagl. Counterinsurgency was an irresistible story of military reform. Smart counterinsurgents such as Colonel H. R. McMaster and Nagl favored a subtle, culturally nuanced approach that emphasized development work over violent action, and they found common cause with journalists who had witnessed firsthand U.S. troops' uncomprehending first encounters with Iraqis. A subtle cultural prejudice may also have been at work. Sophisticated officers with Ph.D.s made for better protagonists than old-school knuckle draggers who preferred to kick down doors in a fruitless hunt for insurgents.

For Greg Jaffe, then a reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
, media-savvy officers such as Nagl—sometimes nicknamed “COINdinistas” because of the military's inevitable reduction of the word “counterinsurgency” to an acronym, COIN—were an irresistible story. “The counterinsugency narrative became an interesting one to me when I was trying to figure out how the hell we were losing this war,” he told me. “And the COIN folks were offering compelling alternatives that you could write about.”

Jaffe was one of the reporters invited to the February 2006 drafting session for the counterinsurgency manual. “To be honest, I think a big part of that was not that they were desperate for our opinions, but they wanted to socialize the document to a certain extent,” he said. “And reporters are going to write about it if they have access to it and access to the people who are writing it.”

The military's embrace of counterinsurgency was not, however, a strictly top-down affair. In many respects, it was a grassroots movement. As many career soldiers returned from frustrating first tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, they began searching for new intellectual guidance that would explain how to set things right.

In generations past, the military's middle management—the noncommissioned officers, platoon leaders and company commanders—had limited say about how the military organized, trained, and equipped. They had few forums for a free and open discussion of the problems they faced in the field. Of course, they might consider submitting articles to military journals such as the Naval Institute's
Proceedings
or the Army's
Parameters
quarterly, but these publications have a fairly long lead time, limited space, and strict editorial guidelines. Professional conferences like the Association of the United States Army symposia offered some outlet for professional discussion, but little opportunity for dissident opinions.

In the post-9/11 era, however, a new generation of professional soldier was able tap the power of the Internet. In 2005 and 2006, as the official counterinsurgency doctrine took shape, the middle ranks of the military, the men and women who were most heavily engaged in nation building, began using Web 2.0 tools—digital communication, e-mail, and social networking—to share their experiences. And the shift to nation building took on a whole new momentum. In 2000, Army Majors Nate Allen and Tony Burgess created a Web site, Companycommand.com, that was modeled on a hunting-and-fishing discussion forum and was meant to serve as a professional forum for young officers. On Companycommand.com, officers could trade tips on everything from navigating Army bureaucracy to negotiating with village elders. The Web site, which allowed open discussion threads, quickly caught on; a year later, Allen and Burgess founded a site for lieutenants, Platoonleader.org.
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The sites were an extraordinary networking tool for junior officers and a medium for immediate and open exchange. The Army establishment, however, was terrified about these discussions taking place on the civilian Internet, potentially in full view of the enemy, although officers were supposed to be self-policing in virtual chat rooms. Eventually both sites were firewalled and brought onto Army servers. To log on, a person needed an Army Knowledge Online account, an official Army e-mail address. The forums continued to be useful for sharing practical advice, but they were not always the best venue for debate. Everything posted would be potentially visible to the person's chain of command.

What the counterinsurgency movement needed was a more freewheeling and unmoderated forum. On official Defense Department sites, users were logged in under their full names and ranks, and people who held unpopular opinions or questioned established policies couldn't do so without fear of retribution. Perhaps more important, the counterinsurgency proponents wanted a forum where they could engage communities
outside
the military: from academia, from nongovernmental organizations, even from the media. After all, nation building demanded civilian expertise as much as it required technical military proficiency.

At the senior level, there was Warlord Loop, an invitation-only e-mail list founded by a retired Army colonel, John Collins. The discussion group included senior military officers, some experienced NCOs, plus a smattering of civilian experts and even a few select reporters. But Warlord Loop was exclusive, limited to a few hundred members.

A new outlet appeared in 2005, with the publication of Small Wars Journal, an online magazine devoted to the study of counterinsurgency and internal war. Small Wars Journal originally looked more like a traditional outlet for scholarly writing and magazine-length articles, but the Small Wars Journal Web site also featured a resource page with reading lists, links to other agency Web sites and archival materials on everything from histories of British involvement in peacekeeping to small wars in the twentieth century. Very quickly, Small Wars Journal attracted an online audience, and it became home to a lively discussion forum and a blog.

The founders of Small Wars Journal, Dave Dilegge and Bill Nagle, had worked together at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia. The site indirectly evolved from the MOUT Homepage, a site originally developed by Dilegge when he was working as an analyst on urban warfare (the acronym MOUT stands for “military operations in urban terrain”). MOUT Homepage was a useful resource for a small community of military experts and scholars who studied urban warfare, and it gradually evolved into an online publication called the Urban Operations Journal. The publication was funded through the Defense Technical Information Center and was on an official site of the Defense Department.

Having an official site had its advantages. Dilegge and Nagle could post items stamped “For Official Use Only” (a designation often used to restrict the circulation of sensitive but unclassified government documents); they also posted after-action reports and other unclassified information that the military wanted to confine to the small community of urban operations specialists. But the official approval process on a government Web site made posting slow and was cumbersome. Dilegge found that it took only a few minutes to draft a post, but it took two to three days for it to go live. The site was not kept up-to-date, and with time, Urban Operations Journal became a dormant page.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, however, Dilegge and Nagle noticed a surge in interest in some of the topics once covered by Urban Operations Journal. In Iraq especially, bypassing the urban areas was no longer an option. It was central to the fight. They took the old template of the Urban Operations Journal and repurposed it. Small Wars Journal would be broader and more inclusive, and would cover the full range of issues: cultural awareness, civilian-led reconstruction and development, counterinsurgency theory and practice. The two men were skilled networkers, and were able to solicit contributions from rising stars within the community—Nagl and Bing West, a former Reagan defense official who wrote the cult Vietnam book
The Village
. Small Wars Journal became a must-read for people in uniform who were looking for answers to the problems they faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Small Wars Journal later had a rogue twin in Abu Muqawama, a blog founded in early 2007 by Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. If Small Wars Journal became an established forum for serious-minded discussion, Abu Muqawama was its hip, snarky counterpart. Exum, a native of east Tennessee and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, founded Abu Muqawama almost on a dare while on a year-long fellowship in Washington. The name was an inside joke: Exum, who had received a master's degree at the American University of Beirut, was a student of Lebanese politics. Exum and his office-mate, Seth Wikas, kept a Hezbollah flag in their office, which features the phrase
al-muqawamah al-islamiyah fi lubnan
: “The Islamic resistance in Lebanon.” The nickname Abu Muqawama means “father of the resistance” in Arabic. The name was suggested by Wikas.

The first post described Abu Muqawama as “a resource and clearinghouse for information relating to contemporary insurgencies.” At first Exum used the pseudonymous blog to highlight links to articles on events in the Middle East and Iraq. Exum had written a serious memoir of combat,
This Man's Army: A Soldier's Story from the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism.
Now he quickly found his voice as a blogger; he had a talent for writing sharp, witty posts laced with pop culture references and subversive humor. The readership of the blog grew exponentially: When he began posting in the spring of 2007, he had around a hundred visitors a day; a year later, his readership had spiked to about three thousand a day. It was a wide and influential audience. Exum had a stable of serious contributors, and his site became both a serious discussion forum as well as a sort of gossip site—a Gawker for the counterinsurgency set.

When Exum founded the blog in early 2007, the counterinsurgents—as the name implied—still viewed themselves as outsiders, a group of insurrectionists bent on challenging conventional thinking within the military. But they were already on the way to becoming the new establishment.

By midsummer 2006, the Army was in the throes of a full-blown intellectual revolt. A few months earlier,
Military Review
, the journal published by the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, published an article by Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British Army officer who had served in Iraq with the U.S.-dominated command from December 2003 to November 2004. Aylwin-Foster's piece captured many of the U.S. Army's failures. He wrote:

My overriding impression was of an Army imbued with an unparalleled sense of patriotism, duty, passion, commitment, and determination, with plenty of talent, and in no way lacking in humanity or compassion. Yet it seemed weighed down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, a pre-disposition to offensive operations, and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on. Many personnel seemed to struggle to understand the nuances of the OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] Phase 4 environment. Moreover, whilst they were almost unfailingly courteous and considerate, at times their cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism.
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It was a devastating critique of the U.S. Army's performance in Mesopotamia, published in one of the Army's leading professional journals. Although many disagreed with points in Aylwin-Foster's critique, the failures in Iraq had indeed spurred profound self-criticism within the Army. Also widely circulated at the time was “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency,” an article by David Kilcullen, a reserve lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army who was seconded to the U.S. State Department as chief strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Kilcullen had completed a doctoral dissertation on Indonesian insurgent and terrorist groups and counterinsurgency methods, and a version of his article was circulated widely by e-mail. It contained a striking injunction: “Practice armed Civil Affairs. Counterinsurgency is armed social work; an attempt to redress basic social and political problems while being shot at.”
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That article was also published in
Military Review
, giving it an official imprimatur.

Fort Leavenworth, the intellectual home of the Army, was caught up in the service's mood of profound professional introspection. Invited there for a series of briefings on the new manual, I was told that two thirds of the students at the School of Advanced Military Studies were now writing theses on the trendy new topic of counterinsurgency. A visit to the campus bookstore would also demonstrate this hunger for new ideas and receptiveness to criticism. One of the top-selling books at the store was
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
, a new hardcover by Tom Ricks, the renowned
Washington Post
military-affairs reporter who had visited Fort Leavenworth in 2005 and recommended that officers start boning up on their French counterinsurgency theory. Ricks was particularly scathing in his treatment of Major General Ray Odierno, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, whose division was known in 2003 and 2004 for an aggressive, “guns-up” posture that alienated Iraqis and set back efforts to win over the population.