I’m happy to announce that the Ohioana Library Association has named Baghdad at Sunrise a 2009 Ohioana Book Award finalist in the nonfiction category.
For anyone in Columbus on May 9, I will also be a featured author at the Ohioana Book Festival. See you there!
I have had the pleasure this fall of traveling coast-to-coast and talking to a number of audiences about Iraq, both the period covered in Baghdad at Sunrise (2003-2004) and the later period during the surge (2007-2008) when I served as executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus. You can catch some of the action at these links:
Tavis Smiley Show (Sep. 30): http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200809/20080930_mansoor.html
World Affairs Council of Houston (Nov. 5): http://www.c-span.org/search.aspx?For=peter%20mansoor
Charlie Rose Show (Nov. 14): http://www.charlierose.com/view/6452
In the final chapter of Baghdad at Sunrise, entitled “Reflections,” I discuss the lessons learned during our first – and fateful – year in Iraq. The United States must learn these lessons and apply them, now and in the future. There is little doubt but that violent extremists will continue to challenge the United States and its allies via terrorism and insurgencies, at least until we manifest the capability to prevail in this type of war. One of the two Presidential candidates will soon inherit the Oval Office and with it a host of problems, foreign and domestic. Here is my bit of advice to them both.
America must learn how to persevere in long struggles, to fight for its vital national interests wherever and whenever it is necessary to do so, and to develop the capability to orchestrate more effectively all elements of national power.
We need to prepare to fight the wars we must fight, and not just the kind of wars we want to fight. The United States has successfully prosecuted counterinsurgency warfare in the past, and can do so now and in the future as well provided we jettison the mindset that all wars are short and sharp, fought at extended distances with stealth and precision, and do not require large numbers of troops or extended occupations.
Counterinsurgency warfare can only be won on the ground, and only by applying all elements of national power to the struggle. Insurgency and counterinsurgency are struggles for legitimacy, for competing visions of governance and the future. The side will win which can gain the people’s trust and confidence, or failing that, to control their movements and actions. To secure a population, forces must position among the people.
Counterinsurgency warfare is troop intensive. Although requirements vary by location and circumstances, a historically based rule of thumb is that successful counterinsurgencies require 20 to 25 security force personnel (army, police, territorial militia, etc.) per 1000 population. Although the requirement to sustain such large-scale forces for an extended period of time mandates considerable expansion of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to meet this strategic need, the best way to provide more ground forces is to procure them from the host nation. Advisor duty will become an essential task for many officers and noncommissioned officers.
Security is but one aspect of counterinsurgency warfare—and not necessarily the most important. Successful counterinsurgency operations require steady progress along all lines of operation: political, security, economic, diplomatic, and informational. Specialized military organizations such as civil affairs and psychological operations forces can assist in this regard, but a truly effective counterinsurgency effort requires civilian expertise, capacity, and resources. The United States must develop an expeditionary civilian capacity to prosecute counterinsurgency warfare in a successful manner.
The actions of military forces and civilian expertise must be united in design and purpose and directed via a coherent operational concept toward a clearly defined strategic goal.
Counterinsurgency is a thinking person’s war. It requires the counterinsurgent to adapt faster than the insurgent, and therefore requires an effective system for gathering, evaluating, and disseminating lessons-learned. A failure to adapt inevitably means defeat. In the future, U.S. Army and Marine Corps officers must spend as much time in the library as they do in the gym, or risk defeat in this kind of war.
Since counterinsurgency warfare is fought among the people, it is ultimately won or lost through human interaction and perceptions. We must fight and win the information war. The Internet itself has become a battlefield in the competition for public support, and we must contest this space rather than cede it to our adversaries. Military operations in a counterinsurgency war, regardless of their actual kinetic impact on insurgent forces, must in the end revolve around the public perceptions of their legitimacy and effectiveness.
To empower leaders who have the most immediate impact on the host nation population, assets must be decentralized and made available for their use. In counterinsurgency warfare, smaller and tailored is generally better than bigger and uniform. Overseas, as in the United States, the norm is that all politics are local.
If effective targeting is crucial to fighting insurgents without alienating the local population, then precise intelligence is the sine qua non of counterinsurgency operations. Intelligence structures must change or risk irrelevance in the counterinsurgency wars of this century. Satellite surveillance, unmanned aerial vehicles, and signals intercept capabilities are crucial, but by themselves are no substitute for human intelligence and cultural understanding. Tribal structures, insurgent networks, sectarian divisions, and ethnic mosaics cannot be divined through technological means. As the United States commenced an intensive campaign of math and science education following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, so must it now pursue excellence in humanities programs such as languages, history, cultural anthropology, and regional studies.
The transformation of American power for the wars of the twenty-first century remains incomplete. Although bulky divisions have given way to smaller, modular, more easily deployable brigade combat teams, the units remain largely configured for conventional combat. Likewise, the culture of the U.S. Army must change, or the organization will be unprepared to fight and win the wars of the twenty-first century. Offensive operations to kill or capture the enemy must be balanced by defensive and stability operations to hold territory, protect civilian populations, and rebuild infrastructure, economies, and political institutions. While retaining the capability to conduct major combat operations, the Army’s culture must shift to embrace missions other than conventional land force combat.
The current personnel system, with its emphasis on rewarding technical and tactical competence at the expense of intellectual understanding and a broader, deeper grasp of the world in which we live, must adapt to promote those leaders with the skill sets and education needed for the wars we will fight in the years ahead. Effective leaders will be those who can think creatively, lead change, understand information warfare and the asymmetric battlefield, and who are flexible and adaptive.
Organizations assigned to foreign internal defense duty—the training and equipping of foreign military forces—must again become vital, resourced parts of our military establishment, as they were during the Cold War. Effective advisory and foreign internal defense organizations, combined with more robust civilian capabilities in the State Department, Agency for International Development, U.S. Information Service, and other parts of the bureaucracy, can help to reduce the chances that problems in foreign lands will erupt into full-blown counterinsurgencies. In other words, to win the fight against twenty-first century terrorists and insurgents, we must first adapt the organizational culture of the U.S. government and our military forces to the realities of twenty-first century conflicts.
We must go to war as a nation if we are to prevail in the extended conflicts of the 21st century. The support of the American people during the four decades of the Cold War shows the possibilities of American power, provided a bi-partisan consensus exists as to the ends of policy. In the current struggle, the American people must once again come together to defeat a grave threat to our nation and our way of life. America cannot long remain a superpower if we think that our wars can be fought solely by the small sliver of society that populates our professional military forces. Only when Americans decide on a shared vision of the future and then volunteer to support and defend the nation and all it stands for when it is threatened, will the Republic and its values endure.
In case you missed my appearance on the Tavis Smiley Show on PBS last Tuesday (September 30), the host began the program by showing me two clips from the first Presidential debate. Each candidate was asked what they had learned from the Iraq War. Senator Barrack Obama stated that we needed to go back to the reasons for going to war in the first place, to realize how big a mistake going to war had been. Senator John McCain stated that he had learned that you cannot win a war with a flawed strategy. Which candidate, Tavis asked me, was correct?
Well, they both are. The Bush administration decision to go to war in 2003 was deeply flawed and a strategic error of the first order. By toppling the Iraqi government, America released the strategic brake on Iran and invited a jihadist migration into Iraq. And strategic errors are difficult if not impossible to overcome with operational or tactical brilliance, as the Germans proved in two world wars during the last century. In fact, we had neither operational nor tactical brilliance (with a few exceptional cases) for several years, until General David Petraeus changed the strategy in 2007 and instituted counterinsurgency techniques that worked.
The adoption of a counterinsurgency strategy that placed the protection of the Iraqi people as the top priority has turned the security situation around and made possible political progress in Iraq. Whether political progress will be forthcoming is up to the Iraqi people to determine – as it should be. But the near total destruction of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was the result of the Sunni tribal rebellion and the offensive operations undertaken by American forces as part of the surge, is an accomplishment that has improved our strategic position in the region, despite the outcome of Iraqi politics.
So Senator Obama is correct in stating that the war was a mistake, but Senator McCain is also correct in stating that we could never win with a failed strategy. We are on firmer ground now, thanks to an improved strategy, inspired leadership, hard fighting by Iraqi and American troops, and Sunni tribal support in the battle to destroy Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Last week I was in New York for a roundtable meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations. The session was hosted by Max Boot, and I was paired for the event with Bing West, author of the excellent book “The Village” about counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War, and more recently “The Strongest Tribe,” one of the many books about the Iraq War that are appearing in print as the surge winds down. Later in the day I interviewed with Charlie Rose for a show that should air sometime this week. During the session he asked me an interesting question, “What is the biggest misconception the American people have regarding the war in Iraq?”
Quite frankly, there are many. I have written about the misconceptions regarding the surge in a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post, “How the Surge Worked” (August 11, p. B-7). But there is a larger set of misconceptions that have to do with American strategic culture. Based on recent conflicts after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Americans have a belief in short wars fought with high technology and limited in time, space, and effort involved. Any informed study of war would suggest that these types of wars are an aberration, and that the historical norm is that wars are most often long, messy, expensive, and full of fog and friction that defy rational analysis up front of the means and ends necessary to wage them successfully. I have tried to convey this sense in “Baghdad at Sunrise,” both in the analysis of what went wrong in 2003-2004, and, in the final chapter of the book (“Reflections”), what we can look forward to in the next several decades. It is a debate worth continuing as Americans consider the strategic direction ahead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
To honor the 24 members of the Ready First Combat Team who were killed in Iraq in 2003-2004, Yale University Press has given me 24 copies of my book to give away free.
I want to use these books to spread the word about “Baghdad at Sunrise” to a wider audience, so here’s the deal:
I’ll give a free book to the first 24 bloggers who agree to review “Baghdad at Sunrise” on their blogs. Just post a comment on this blog with your blog URL, your email address, and your snail mail address – domestic U.S. addresses only (including APO and FPO). Don’t worry; your post will not appear to the public on my blog, and I will not publish your personal information. I will add a link to your blog URL where your review of my book will be posted.
Those of you who will receive books will get a confirmation from my publisher that your book is in the mail. I look forward to your reviews of what I think is an important work on the history of the Iraq War.
When I deployed to Iraq in June 2003, I decided to keep a daily journal as a personal memoir for my family. This was, after all, my first experience in combat, and my experiences as the commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division (aka the “Ready First Combat Team”) would be a defining moment in my life. For 13 months I wrote faithfully in my journal every day (or, more usually, late at night), no matter how tired I was. When I returned home in July 2004, I considered expanding the journal into a book-length manuscript, albeit still with the idea to present it as a personal memoir for my family. After some reflection, I decided that a more expansive treatment of my experiences in Iraq could fill a broader need by explaining what went right and wrong during the crucial first year after the fall of Baghdad in the spring of 2003.
Currently, the Iraq War genre is filled with books written by junior officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers recounting their experiences on the streets and in the deserts of Iraq. Although a few of these works are quite good, on the whole they lack context at the higher operational and strategic levels of the war. Books written by reporters fill some of this void, but these works are written by those on the outside of the military peering into headquarters to which they did not belong. Memoirs by very senior political and military leaders are more or less self-exculpatory, and too often attempt to deflect blame for what went wrong. A significant void currently exists in the history of the war, one which I try to fill with Baghdad at Sunrise. By explaining the conflict from the perspective of a senior commander who served in Iraq, the book fills a critical gap in the public’s understanding of the war.
Beyond giving the public a better idea of what happened on the ground in Iraq in the war’s first year, the broader goal of Baghdad at Sunrise is to provide lessons for the future as the United States and its allies continue the struggle in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. A lot has been written about our political and strategic failings, but the story of U.S. Army operations in Iraq has been told mainly through the eyes of people outside the institution. My hope is that the book is also a good read – a story not just worth telling, but a story well told.
