Moyar Mark. A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq
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254 e Iraq War
result, gained the status of a strong leader, an asset that he had been sorely
missing. Sunnis applauded his willingness to combat the Shiite militias, and
the Americans toned down their criticisms of his leadership.115
Another ashpoint at this time was Mosul. e counterinsurgency eort
was bogged down there because of Iraqi commanders who were unwilling to
lead their troops into combat. As in Basra, Maliki moved crack units to Mosul
from other parts of the country. In May, with minimal help from U.S. combat
troops, the Iraqi security forces launched a new wave of operations that swept
most of the insurgents from the city.116
In 2008, Petraeus repeatedly intervened when the Iraqi Ministry of the
Interior tried to expel Sunni ocers in the security forces whose only trans-
gression was combating the Shiite militias, and he oen succeeded. He also
convinced Maliki to purge more of the sectarian and ineectual police and
military commanders. Murders of Sunni military ocers and Sunni civilians
dropped sharply. e number of Iraqi units that could conduct counterinsur-
gency operations without major external support increased, although numer-
ous Iraqi units remained heavily dependent on American logistics and main-
tenance because of cultural inattentiveness to these functions and the pilfering
of supplies by corrupt ocers.117
e American occupation of Iraq is a story of leadership opportunities ex-
ploited and squandered. e rst scenes of the drama were lled mostly with
squandering. Douglas Feith, despite his creativity and intelligence, committed
grievous mistakes during the preparation for war and in the rst months of
occupation because of deciencies in judgment, organization, and sociability.
Many of the early failures in Iraq can be attributed to the ineective leadership
of Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general; Tommy Franks, an Army gen-
eral; and Ricardo Sanchez, an Army lieutenant general. All three were short on
creativity, exibility, and organizational ability, which kept them from taking
actions early on that would have increased popular support for the Americans
and undermined would-be insurgents, such as stopping looters and restoring
electrical service and basic governance. e appointment of these three o-
cers to positions of high authority is indicative of the incongruity between the
demands of counterinsurgency and the priorities of the U.S. Army personnel
system in the years leading up to 2003.
e diplomat L. Paul Bremer and the other Americans who masterminded
de-Baathication and the disbanding of the Iraqi army did not anticipate the
disastrous consequences of those decisions because they lacked empathy and
e Iraq War 255
judgment, as well as historical knowledge. Had they studied the American
South aer the Civil War, a much better analogue to Iraq than Germany aer
World War II, they might have foreseen that disfranchising entrenched elites
and transferring political power to a new group of uncertain character via
elections would drive the old elites into rebellion. Bremer exacerbated the ani-
mosity of the old elites, as well as the rest of the population, with his choices
of Iraqi leaders; he empowered individuals who, like the new elites of Recon-
struction, were inexperienced, inept, corrupt, and disdainful of large segments
of the populace. CPA and other civilian U.S. governmental agencies could have
assuaged some of the resentment by implementing large political and eco-
nomic programs, but they were too small and too averse to risking casualties.
Although adaptive U.S. military commanders stepped into the void and found
ways to run the country, they would have been more successful with the help
of experienced and skilled American civilians and Iraqis.
In the rst years of the war, the performance of U.S. military commanders
varied widely because of dierences in prewar training and education and,
more important, leadership traits. Frequent brushes with counterinsurgents
and leadership cultures that exalted certain traits meant that the Marine Corps
and the Army Special Forces exceeded the regular Army in preparation for
counterinsurgency and in the attributes of counterinsurgency leadership. Tal-
ented ocers unfamiliar with counterinsurgency oen succeeded nonetheless
by improvising, experimenting, and inspiring, while ocers who knew a good
deal about counterinsurgency sometimes failed because they did not produce
solutions tailored to local dynamics, did not cultivate Iraqis who could help
them, or did not control their troops.
Serious as the leadership problems were on the American side, those on the
Iraqi side were far worse. Large numbers of Iraqi commanders lacked initiative
and determination, and therefore they and their troops were likely to die or
ee when the insurgents began attacking in force. In the initial development
of Iraq’s security forces, CPA repeated the error, by now familiar to readers of
this book, of paying much more attention to mass-training of recruits than
to leadership development and selection. Putting civilian contractors and the
State Department in charge of force development yielded dreadfully incapable
forces, eventually compelling the White House to turn over complete respon-
sibility for Iraqi security forces to the U.S. military, which performed much
better by virtue of its superior appreciation for leadership problems and its
greater willingness to urge command changes on the Iraqi government. e
256 e Iraq War
military also beneted from Bremer’s belated recognition that the Iraqi secu-
rity forces needed competent and experienced leaders, which caused him, in
April 2004, to allow former Iraqi army ocers back in. at policy shi led
to considerable improvement in the new army, although it did not bring back
into the fold large numbers of disaected elites who had already become in-
surgents.
When the United States handed the new Iraqi government authority to
select security force commanders in June 2004, it deferred nobly to national
independence, but the transfer set the Iraqi security forces back at least sev-
eral years and caused the loss of much Iraqi and American blood. e Shiite-
dominated government used this authority to put unqualied friends and po-
litical cronies into commands and to keep able Sunnis out. e government
made commanders out of men who instigated or condoned the butchering of
Sunnis, and it removed commanders who tried to stop the slaughter.
General George Casey’s strategy of employing American forces to clear
areas of insurgents and then dispatching Iraqi forces to hold those areas made
much sense in theory, for it played to the strengths of each group and en-
couraged Iraqis to shi into a higher gear. It failed on Iraq’s streets, however,
because the Iraqi forces did not have the leaders to carry out the hold phase
successfully. Even where U.S. special operations forces eliminated insurgents
in signicant numbers, as they sometimes did, insurgents could not be kept
out of an area permanently without well-led Iraqi forces. American advisers
could impart valuable knowledge, provide sound recommendations, and in-
spire their counterparts, but they could not turn Iraqis of modest abilities into
strong commanders. Short of having their counterparts replaced, these ad-
visers could transform the Iraqi units only by taking command themselves, an
arrangement that neither the U.S. government nor the Iraqi government was
willing to accept on a sustained basis.
In Anbar province, home to the most formidable Sunni rebels, the Ameri-
cans eventually became so frustrated by the superiority of the Iraqi insur-
gents to the Iraqi counterinsurgents that they scaled back their ambitions for
a democratic Iraq and courted tribal leaders who derived their authority from
bloodlines instead of the ballot box. American oers of power and funding
for tribal militias helped encourage sheiks to switch sides, but it took gied
American commanders, capable of establishing military dominance and de-
veloping personal relationships, to cement alliances. On the Iraqi side, it took
charismatic and dedicated tribal leaders to stand up to AQI and destroy it.
e Iraq War 257
Once the right elites were allied with the Americans in a given area, violence
came to an end within a few months, even in places where peace had eluded
American forces for several years. is result was a reminder of the power of
traditional elites and common identity between elites and followers, and hence
of the tragic costs of tossing aside Iraq’s traditional elites in 2003. Although the
Awakening and similar initiatives undid some of the damage caused by the
upending of Iraq’s elites in 2003, large elements of the Shiite and Sunni elites
remained hostile to one another, which has continued to frustrate the integra-
tion of Sunni elites into the government, an essential ingredient for long-term
peace and stability.
During General Petraeus’s time as commander in Iraq, his emphasis on
adaptation did much to promote adaptive leadership within the U.S. Army,
for whom it was a more pressing issue than for the Marine Corps. Petraeus
issued guidance and doctrine that advocated adaptation, and he produced a
conducive command climate. But the new counterinsurgency eld manual im-
peded innovation to a degree by advancing as universal certain principles and
methods that were not actually viable in all or even most counterinsurgency
settings, most notably the principles that force must be kept to an absolute
minimum and that counterinsurgents must always focus on obtaining popular
support, rather than on destroying the enemy. e better commanders knew
to treat such principles and methods as less than sacrosanct.
Petraeus, like Creighton Abrams in Vietnam, increased the involvement of
U.S. forces in population security and nonmilitary programs but did not aban-
don oensive operations against the enemy. He called for some large oensive
operations himself, because he believed them essential to defeating the insur-
gents. In accordance with the principle of decentralized command, Petraeus
allowed subordinate commanders to order oensive operations when they
deemed them necessary, and those commanders, including the most astute
and exible of them, oen deemed such oensive operations necessary. Only
when oensive operations were conducted so intensively that they squeezed
out civil operations and other military operations was Petraeus inclined to
chastise a commander for overusing them.
Like Abrams, too, Petraeus bolstered the counterinsurgency by eecting
leadership changes within the indigenous government. Perceiving that Iraqi
commanders were too feeble to defeat the insurgents in Baghdad and many
other locales, Petraeus used persuasion and the threat of withholding aid to
secure major changes in the Iraqi army leadership and wholesale changes in
258 e Iraq War
the Iraqi police leadership. Finding adequate replacements was a greater chal-
lenge in Iraq than in Vietnam during Abrams’s tenure, for there were far too
few experienced ocers to plug holes in existing units while also supplying
new units. Although the Iraqi government had begun to generate new lieuten-
ants, it had an acute shortage of eld-grade ocers with enough experience
and talent to hold the critical jobs at the apex of local security forces—particu-
larly the jobs of battalion commander and district police chief. e leaders of
Iraq’s security forces, like their predecessors in El Salvador and Vietnam, need
time and American help to build an ocer corps that is both large and capable.
A big fraction of that time and help lies in the future.
259
T
he nine cases presented in this book oer a multitude of lessons for
those seeking to improve counterinsurgency leadership today and
tomorrow. Although a few of the lessons apply to all counterinsurgen-
cies, most apply only under certain conditions. e commander must become
intimately familiar with the dynamics of the particular insurgent environment
and use judgment and creativity to determine when and how the lessons of the
past can be applied protably.
Improving Leadership Attributes
Many of the ten critical attributes of good counterinsurgency leadership—ini-
tiative, exibility, creativity, judgment, empathy, charisma, sociability, dedica-
tion, integrity, and organization—can be enhanced, to varying degrees, through
self-improvement, experience, and guidance from superiors. By studying the
history and theory of counterinsurgency leadership, commanders can identify
their own deciencies in key attributes and strive to improve in those areas.
ey likewise can identify deciencies in subordinate commanders and take
corrective action, whether by serving as mentors or by providing appropriate
training and education.
Initiative, dedication, and integrity are the attributes most subject to free
will and therefore have the greatest potential for enhancement. Improvements
may result from a moment’s realization or an emotional spark, from attach-
ment to ideals like nationalism or religion, or from external stimuli such as
CHAPTER 11
How to Win
260 How to Win
insurgent atrocities or the deaths of comrades. Like Ramon Magsaysay and
Gerald Templer, leaders can use their charisma and their personal example
to inspire subordinate commanders to heightened initiative, dedication, and
integrity—to such an extent that they can make the dierence between victory
and defeat.
Judgment and organization involve the exercise of mental faculties with
which commanders are not all equally endowed, but these two attributes can
nonetheless be augmented. Because every commander employs judgment
and organization regularly, a leader’s levels of these attributes usually increase
over time. ey can be enhanced further through training and education and
through the extra practice provided by delegating authority to lower levels of
command.
Some of the characteristics that confer charisma are plainly the result of
nature, such as height, physique, facial features, and voice. Others, however,
are at least in part the result of nurture—self-condence, bearing, devotion,
and asceticism, for example. Although many academics remain badly con-
fused on the subject of charisma, or deny its existence altogether, professional
armed forces have long understood how to bolster the charisma of ocers,
from the lowliest lieutenants on up, through training and coaching.
e military has much less experience in enhancing sociability and empa-
thy, the latter being the only one of the ten key attributes that is absent from
the personality types most closely matched to the needs of counterinsurgency
leadership. Both sociability and empathy can be increased through the eorts
of leaders and those who oversee them. Colonel H. R. McMaster, it may be re-
called, prepared his troops during training by having them imagine how Iraqis
would view their actions. Education on foreign cultures demonstrates the real-
world value of empathy and illuminates the dierences between cultures in
how they view the world.
Of the ten attributes, the most dicult for humans to improve are exibility
and creativity, the cornerstones of adaptive leadership. But those attributes can
be enhanced to some degree through training, education, and experiences, if
those activities demand reliance on adaptation and complex problem solving.
Recently, some reformers have advocated making the U.S. Army an “adaptive
organization” by transforming the organizational culture through new poli-
cies, incentives, educational programs, and organizational structures.1 e
desired nal product—an adaptive organization—is the correct one, but the
instruments proposed for creating it are inadequate; they cannot reshape an
How to Win 261
organization by themselves any more than chisels and rasps alone can change
the shape of marble. Sweeping change requires senior leaders with change-
oriented personalities who, like sculptors, use their tools creatively to make
the organization and its culture adaptive.2
In this book’s nine cases, top leaders occasionally devised innovative strate-
gies or methods that helped local commanders across the theater of war, such
as the Briggs plan in Malaya and the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam. e
main function of senior leaders in achieving adaptation, however, was to en-
courage innovation and risk-taking at lower levels through guidance, training,
education, and doctrine. Creative leaders like Gerald Templer, James Mattis,
and David Petraeus all promoted adaptive leadership in this way. Most adap-
tation took place when local commanders had the attributes to comprehend
the dynamics of the environment and to cra viable new methods. Contrary
to much theorizing about the stiing of creativity inherent in the conventional
organization of armed forces, conventional forces adapted very well when they
had adaptive commanders, even when they had not been exposed to counter-
insurgency doctrine or specialized counterinsurgency training beforehand.
In a preponderance of the cases, indigenous culture seriously impeded
Western eorts to boost certain key attributes in host-nation leaders. In some
cultures—such as those of South Vietnam and Afghanistan—dedication to a
political cause was oen viewed as less important than dedication to family,
so the elites generally tolerated agrant nepotism and corruption. In countries
with traditions of highly centralized authority, like El Salvador and Iraq, o-
cers at lower levels were reluctant to take the initiative or make decisions, no
matter how oen the Americans preached the virtues of decentralized com-
mand. Breaking through this sort of cultural resistance usually took a high-
level indigenous leader who was extraordinarily exible and committed to
change, someone like Ramon Magsaysay or Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova.
Recruiting
Because many of the key attributes are inuenced by heredity, upbringing, or
ingrained culture, counterinsurgents should adjust their screening of ocer
candidates to give preference to individuals already rich in those attributes.
One objection that might be raised to such an adjustment is that focusing
on readiness for counterinsurgency is inappropriate for armed forces that
must be prepared for conventional warfare as well as counterinsurgency. But a
262 How to Win
good counterinsurgency leader will also be a good conventional leader, while
a good conventional leader will not always make a good counterinsurgency
leader. Counterinsurgency leadership requires all the attributes of conven-
tional leadership plus additional ones—empathy and sociability—and it re-
quires higher degrees of exibility and creativity. In the nine conicts con-
tained herein, counterinsurgency commanders had to conduct a wide range
of activities that required those extra and amplied traits, such as leading
complex nonmilitary programs, gaining cooperation from civilians and allies,
and obtaining intelligence on elusive guerrillas. In the Civil War and during
Reconstruction, ocers like Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip
Sheridan showed that highly successful conventional commanders could be
highly unsuccessful counterinsurgency commanders. Because of inadequate
empathy, judgment, or integrity, they used the tools of destruction without
discriminating adequately between friend, neutral, and enemy, thereby in-
creasing civilian hostility toward the counterinsurgency. ey were too inex-
ible to grapple eectively with moral ambiguities and make the sorts of com-
promises that would have enabled them to gain the support of Southerners.
For leadership candidates who have not been monitored and assessed in
leadership situations, testing for the ten key attributes of counterinsurgency
leadership is the best way to predict success in counterinsurgency command.
Psychologists have developed tests that pinpoint some of these traits but not
others. Until more tests are readily available, the best alternative is to use exist-
ing personality tests to identify individuals whose personality types align most
closely with the ten attributes.
In the United States the personality test used most commonly by the mili-
tary, government, and business, and hence the one easiest to apply to this task,
is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Derived from the theories of the
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, this testing instrument places individuals into
one of two categories along each of four personality dimensions: extraverted
(E) versus introverted (I), sensing (S) versus intuitive (I), thinking (T) ver-
sus feeling (F), and judging (J) versus perceiving (P). For the purposes of this
book, the pair that is most important is sensing versus intuitive. Sensing indi-
viduals rely primarily on the ve senses to tell them about the world, which
causes them to focus on concrete facts, details, and the present. ey prefer
their information in structured form and are most comfortable when it is pre-
sented in 100-slide PowerPoint presentations with multicolor charts and ex-
haustive statistics. Intuitive individuals rely primarily on insight, which causes
How to Win 263
them to focus on abstract ideas, the big picture, and the future. ey nd rigid
structures unnecessarily constraining and like their information served up in
short memoranda that convey the most important insights and information.
Each of the sixteen possible combinations of the MBTI categories con-
stitutes a distinct personality type. Two of the sixteen types stand above the
others in matching the attributes of eective counterinsurgency leaders—
INTJ and ENTJ, commonly nicknamed Mastermind and Field Marshal. Both
are high in initiative, judgment, creativity, and dedication. e Mastermind
type is also high in exibility, while the Field Marshal type has high levels of
charisma, organization, and sociability. Masterminds are considered the best
of all the personality types at nding creative solutions to complex problems;
Field Marshals are considered the best at leading.3 People of these two types
are especially valuable recruits for leadership positions in counterinsurgency
because they are loaded with important attributes that are heavily inuenced
by heredity. It is no surprise that INTJs and ENTJs are plentiful in the leader-
ship ranks of all sorts of organizations.
Two other personality types, Architect (INTP) and Inventor (ENTP), join
Mastermind and Field Marshal to form the “intuitive-thinking” group, which
is generally characterized by innovation, rationality, and strategic insight.
Organizations dominated by intuitive-thinking personalities are known for
their ability to adapt to changing circumstances and their commitment to con-
tinuous self-examination and self-improvement. Hence, they tend to thrive
in elds that involve frequent and rapid change—such as counterinsurgency.
ey are the second most common types of organizations.4
e most common types of organizations are dominated by “sensing-
judging” personality types, Inspector (ISTJ) and Supervisor (ESTJ) in particu-
lar. Most organs of the U.S. military t into this category.5 Studies by leader-
ship experts and psychologists have found that sensing-judging organizations
cherish structure, control, and standard operating procedures. Inclined to de-
velop detailed plans based on past experiences, they are reluctant to deviate
from plans or try new approaches. ey do not generate major innovations,
although they may excel at making incremental changes to the existing system
or quick xes to tactical problems. Sensing-judging organizations thrive in en-
vironments that change little. ey also predominate among very large organi-
zations because size creates a need for standardization—which helps explain,
for example, why the U.S. Army has stronger sensing-judging tendencies than
do the U.S. Marine Corps and most special operations forces.6