Moyar Mark. A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq
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264 How to Win
In the decades preceding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, recruitment
and promotion in the U.S. Army and, to a lesser extent, the U.S. Marine Corps,
favored those best suited to conventional warfare, which in practice oen
meant those with sensing-judging personalities. Two counterinsurgent wars
have not resulted in dramatic changes to recruitment and promotion. In the
Counterinsurgency Leadership Survey conducted for this book in 2008, only
10 percent of Army respondents and 3 percent of Marine respondents stated
that their service had made major changes to how it recruited and promoted
ocers since the beginning of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Seventy-six percent of Army respondents and 46 percent of the
Marines believed that their service needed to make further substantial changes
to yield commanders highly capable of leading in an insurgent environment.7
As a general principle, recruiters from the armed forces and other organi-
zations involved in counterinsurgency should target individuals with intuitive-
thinking personality types. Recruiting them in large numbers may require a
special eort, particularly in a conscripted armed force, for intuitive-thinkers
comprise only 6 percent of the general population.8 For the U.S. military, how-
ever, focused recruiting is not a viable option at present, because the heavy
demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan prevent the armed services from
being so selective in whom they admit into the ranks of ocers. Fortunately,
the young men and women who enter as ocers include a disproportion-
ately high share of intuitive-thinkers.9 No doubt the natural leadership abili-
ties of these individuals draws them to the military, and draws the military to
them. e ocer corps, moreover, does not have to bulge with prototypical
counterinsurgency leaders. A large percentage of ocers will go into support
areas or aviation, where they are not likely to lead counterinsurgents in the
eld. And the number of commanders who do lead troops in the midst of the
insurgency-aicted population is relatively small, especially at the middle and
upper levels of command. e principal challenge, then, lies in nding that
minority of ocers best suited for the key counterinsurgency commands.
While the U.S. military is right to give special attention to the pursuit of
creative and exible ocers, other organizations seeking good counterin-
surgency leaders should beware of placing too much emphasis on those at-
tributes, for they are insucient without the other eight. e leadership of the
U.S. military is suused with most of those other eight because people who
are decient in many of them are systematically weeded out. Many other civil
and military organizations around the world do not have such bounty, be-
How to Win 265
cause of the lack of rigorous hiring and promotion systems or because of cul-
tural and political factors, and can ill aord to disregard individuals who are
strong in those eight traits but not very creative or exible. During the Iraq
War and other counterinsurgencies, the civilian side of the U.S. government
suered from the presence of leaders who were creative but were wanting in
other areas, such as organization, initiative, charisma, dedication, judgment,
or sociability. Such creative people can be very useful in dreaming up new
counterinsurgency technologies or envisioning the future of warfare, but they
cannot cope with the human dimensions of counterinsurgency leadership or
its day-to-day practical challenges.
Leadership Development
In the cases examined here, the counterinsurgents typically responded to the
mushrooming of the insurgency with a rapid expansion of their security forces
but were, in many instances, stymied by their inability to provide those forces
with leaders of adequate experience and talent. Time and again, counterinsur-
gent planners assumed that training and equipping large numbers of forces
would suce, and gave scant attention to leadership quality. e resultant
forces were invariably distinguished by inertia, ineptitude, and degeneracy. At
times, force expansion occurred with such swiness that it actually diminished
overall capability, for the good leaders were spread too thinly and the ratio of
good leaders to weak leaders sank too far. Avoiding this pitfall requires screen-
ing potential leaders carefully and limiting the force expansion rate based on
the availability of competent leaders. It may even call for shrinking the size of
forces that have grown too quickly, as Gerald Templer did with the Malayan
police.
When the counterinsurgents tried to mass-produce ocers by putting in-
experienced recruits through very short ocer-training programs, as in Af-
ghanistan and Iraq, they rolled out woefully defective products. In Malaya,
El Salvador, and Vietnam, the counterinsurgents had a larger pool of experi-
enced leaders to tap when creating new units, but too many of them were of
low caliber. e British were able to x the leadership problems in the Malayan
security forces by importing ocers from other parts of their empire. In El
Salvador, good leaders were developed slowly and were still too few in number
when the war ended. South Vietnam took seven years to produce the leaders
required for top local-level commands, and many of those were not molded
266 How to Win
from completely raw material but were young men with a few years of experi-
ence ghting in the Franco–Viet Minh War. In countries without such a base
of experience, developing a new generation of leaders is likely to take ten years
at the very least.
Eective leadership did not develop automatically with the accumulation
of experience. Eectiveness depended upon the leaders at the national level
who set the standards for recruitment and advancement and determined the
rigor and nature of development programs. Without Ngo Dinh Diem’s leader-
ship, the South Vietnamese leaders who were produced between 1954 and 1961
would have been no better than their predecessors. In El Salvador, Afghani-
stan, and Iraq, eorts to develop leaders were hindered by the national leader-
ship’s inactivity and its toleration of abuses of power. El Salvador eventually
attained national leaders, in the form of the minister of defense and the chief
of state, who guided eective leadership development. Afghanistan and Iraq
had decent leaders at the top of their defense ministries but poor leaders in the
Interior and other ministries and in the chief of state’s oce, with the result
that leadership development progressed much more quickly in the military
than in the rest of the government.
Doctrine, training, and education contributed to leadership development
by familiarizing leaders with counterinsurgency basics before they were thrust
into a counterinsurgency situation for the rst time. e U.S. Marine ocers
and U.S. Army Special Forces ocers who assumed occupation duty in Af-
ghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003 had been familiarized with counterinsur-
gency in advance, whereas most U.S. Army ocers had not, a result of the Ar-
my’s gutting of counterinsurgency from its training and education programs
aer the Vietnam War. is dierence helped account for the ability of the
Marine Corps and the Special Forces to become eective more quickly than
the regular Army. e Army’s ocers oen had to spend much of their initial
tours learning the basics, and some never fully comprehended the basics. Aer
the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq are over, the United States must at
all costs avoid the mistake of expunging counterinsurgency from training and
education.
Doctrine, training, and education could get an ocer o the ground more
quickly than on-the-job training, but they did not determine how high that
ocer could y. e counterinsurgency commanders most abundant in the
ten leadership attributes soared the highest, miles above those not well en-
How to Win 267
dowed with the attributes. Experience, self-improvement, guidance from
commanders, and advanced study of counterinsurgency history and theory
brought them toward maximum altitude.
Foreign Influence on Leadership Development
When attempting to build the counterinsurgency capabilities of third world
allies, Western countries were oen slow to grasp the importance of leadership
development, even though their allies’ leadership problems were usually much
worse than any seen in the West. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the task of devel-
oping indigenous security forces belonged at rst to civilian agencies of the
U.S. government and to private American contractors. Both groups performed
miserably, owing to the inadequate experience and numerical strength of their
personnel. e U.S. government eventually relieved them of these duties and
handed the U.S. military responsibility for all indigenous security forces, to
include the police, disregarding objections from American civilians that the
police had to remain under civilian control to prevent militarization of the
state. e U.S. military performed much better in security force development
than the civilian and private organizations had, primarily because of its su-
periority in improving leadership quality through advising, training, and the
inuencing of command selection. ese experiences suggest that the United
States should, in future conicts, charge the U.S. military with developing all
indigenous security forces, rather than conducting further experiments with
civilian control. As a corollary, the military should continue to prepare numer-
ous ocers for security assistance, even during periods of peace. In times of
war, the military should assign some of its nest ocers to indigenous security
force development, as it did when it put General David Petraeus in charge of
Iraq’s security forces in 2004.
During the Salvadoran Insurgency, the United States assigned advisers to
work with Salvadoran ocers, and it sent Salvadorans through ocer train-
ing programs in the United States. In addition to inculcating basic skills and
methods, the Americans preached the importance of respecting human rights.
Acts of persuasion did not always suce to halt human rights abuses, so on
occasion the Americans used the threat of aid termination to compel compli-
ance with international norms. In principle, threats to terminate aid would
have been better used to demand the replacement of poor leaders, but U.S.
268 How to Win
politics were such that essential aid to El Salvador was conditioned on respect
for human rights, and therefore American leverage had to be devoted to the
human rights issue.
American advisers spent countless hours counseling non-Western allies to
develop good sta ocers and noncommissioned ocers who could take up
some of the slack if a commander was weak or incapacitated. is advice rarely
sank in. For Salvadorans, Afghans, and Iraqis, it ran contrary to the traditional
centralization of authority and status. Whatever progress was made in this area
was very gradual and was usually the result of persistent American action or
pressure. e continued lack of strong sta ocers and noncommissioned o-
cers meant that the quality of host-nation commanders remained even more
important to unit eectiveness for their forces than it was for U.S. units.
Because of diering personalities and occupational specializations, for-
eign advisers varied greatly in their eectiveness. In the cases studied here,
sociable and empathetic ocers generally made better advisers than others.
e same could be said of ocers who had experience in the type of work that
their counterparts were performing. An American with past experience lead-
ing an infantry battalion made a much better adviser to an infantry battalion
commander than did an American whose past experiences had all been in
aircra maintenance. In recent conicts, the Marines have tried harder than
the Army to nd ocers with the optimal personality traits and expertise. No
matter how compatible they were with their counterparts, however, advisers
could not transform poor ocers into successful commanders.
Command Selection and Deselection
In all of the case studies, some senior leaders dedicated more attention to leader-
ship appointments than others, and hence made better choices of commanders
and more oen replaced poor commanders. Some of the most eective leaders
at the national level made leadership selection a top priority. Leaving their
stas in charge of administrative matters, they devoted long stretches of time
to touring the country in order, among other things, to assess leaders and re
or promote them as necessary. One of the most important lessons, therefore,
is also one of the simplest: senior commanders should make leadership selec-
tion and deselection one of their top priorities. If possible, counterinsurgency
leaders should also dedicate some of their best ocers to the task of assessing
commanders and potential commanders.
How to Win 269
Leaders and organizational personnel systems varied greatly in their suc-
cess in appointing commanders with the attributes required in counterin-
surgency. Empathy and sociability, for instance, were oen given short shri
by military organizations. Sensing-judging organizations like the U.S. Army
underemphasized exibility and creativity.
e U.S. Army, owing to its size and the entrenchment of personalities,
will no doubt remain a sensing-judging organization, but it can become closer
to an intuitive-thinking organization by putting more intuitive-thinking o-
cers into important leadership slots. e rst step is to steer young ocers
with those personality types into the military occupational specialties that
have a high probability of leading to counterinsurgency command—mainly
the ground combat arms, civil aairs, and special operations. ese are also
the Army specializations that have the greatest need for adaptive leaders in
conventional warfare. Ocers with sensing-judging personalities can be shep-
herded toward specialties where structure and standard procedures remain the
norm, such as air trac control, supply, and acquisition. is approach ensures
the assignment of intuitive-thinking leaders at the lowest levels of counterin-
surgency command and increases the likelihood that they will become battal-
ion commanders, oen the most valuable commanders in counterinsurgency.
When sensing-judging ocers dominate military-promotion and
command-selection boards, as they oen do, the boards are less likely to ad-
vance intuitive-thinking ocers than other types, because intuitive-thinkers
do not t the standard mold. Sensing-judging commanding ocers are likely
to have a similar bias in writing ocer eciency reports, which those boards
use in making choices. e intuitive-thinking ocers under evaluation may
seem less qualied to sensing-judgers because, for example, they may have
spent more of their career than the average ocer in academic study or in
unusual jobs, or because they may have demonstrated less attention to minor
details or less deference to standard operating procedures. On the plus side,
numerous U.S. Army ocers have come to appreciate the importance of cre-
ativity and complex problem solving in the streets of Iraq or the elds of Af-
ghanistan, and they assess other ocers accordingly. e same does not hold
true, however, for the majority of ocers, for they have not had those experi-
ences, and they continue to follow the procedures that were followed ten or
twenty years ago; they may operate in logistics, nance, engineering, or any
of a number of other elds where standard methods still work most of the
time.10
270 How to Win
Ocers who seek to increase innovation in the U.S. Army view ongoing
favoritism toward sensing-judging behavior within the ocer corps as the prin-
cipal impediment to progress. Lieutenant General David Barno, commander
of coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, said in 2008, “I still tend
to see, especially at the most senior level, more rewards for teamwork, confor-
mance, and aggressiveness than I see for creativity, adaptability, outside-the-
box solutions. I don’t see a pattern of rewarding those behaviors.”11 Colonel
Peter Mansoor, who retired aer serving as General David Petraeus’s executive
ocer in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, faults the U.S. Army’s personnel system for
“rewarding technical and tactical competence at the expense of intellectual
understanding and a broader, deeper grasp of the world in which we live.”
e system must be changed, he believes, to reward “those who can think cre-
atively, lead change, and understand information warfare and the asymmetric
battleeld—those who are exible and adaptive.”12
Top leaders must ensure that intuitive-thinking ocers receive fair treat-
ment in promotion and command selection decisions. e senior leadership
may even wish to promote intuitive-thinkers above others with similar levels
of experience and records of achievement. General Charles Krulak, during his
time as Marine Corps commandant, met with all of the Marine promotion
and command selection boards to ensure that they did not overlook intuitive-
thinking ocers who did not t into the sensing-judging box.13 General David
Petraeus’s participation in the U.S. Army’s brigadier general selection process
was likewise an attempt to promote intuitive-thinking individuals within a
sensing-judging organization. As Army chief of sta, General George Casey
recently instructed Army promotion and command selection boards to reward
adaptive leadership because he believed that senior ocers without counterin-
surgency experience did not fully appreciate the special need for adaptiveness
and other high intellectual abilities in counterinsurgency.14 Whether the pro-
ponents of intuitive-thinking leadership will prevail is one of the most impor-
tant questions for the U.S. Army in the early twenty-rst century.
Although personality type should be a key criterion when recruiting o-
cers and determining their occupational specialties, actual demonstration of
leadership attributes during assignments must be accorded much weight in
promotion and command selection. Some intuitive-thinkers will be too weak
in essential areas to make strong leaders in practice, and some non-intuitive-
thinkers may be blessed with plentiful creativity and exibility. Nor should the
other eight traits besides creativity and exibility be discounted, even in highly
How to Win 271
professional military organizations that habitually screen for those traits, and
ocers with a variety of personality types are well supplied with those eight.
While some counterinsurgency organizations ignored benecial attributes
in selecting commanders, others just as frequently favored attributes that were
irrelevant or even harmful. Commanders in the upper echelons of the U.S.
occupation forces during the Philippine Insurrection were appointed based
strictly upon seniority. Salvadoran ocers earned appointments based upon
the year they graduated from the military academy. During the rst years of
the Huk Rebellion and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, indigenous leaders
routinely gave commands to friends and family.
In most of the nine cases, political considerations frequently outweighed
merit in the appointment of commanders. War, however, is ultimately a po-
litical enterprise, so politics at times deserved precedence over merit. When
the indigenous government or the general population was plagued by internal
dissension, selecting the leader of a political faction could garner badly needed
support for the government. Abraham Lincoln’s appointment of political gen-
erals gained the votes and recruits required to continue prosecution of the war.
Hamid Karzai obtained support from Afghanistan’s disparate ethnic groups by
appointing ocers in proportion to each group’s representation in the popu-
lation. In South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem had to appoint some ocers on
the basis of personal loyalty in order to prevent a coup by military ocers
who were entirely unt to lead the nation, a never-ending threat because of
the fractious character of the country’s elites. National leaders had to strike a
balance between political considerations and merit when selecting leaders; if
politics trumped merit too oen, the counterinsurgents did not have enough
leaders to conduct the necessary counterinsurgency operations. Afghanistan
and Iraq provided prime examples of governments rendered ineective by the
excessive politicization of appointments.
One useful method of discouraging non-merit appointments was the use
of centralized selection boards. Depending on the size of the organization, a
certain number of board members would not know the ocers in question
and thus could be objective in appraising them. Factionalism could be discour-
aged by selecting board members at random or by making a conscious eort
to prevent one faction from dominating. Centralized selection has generally
been a success in the U.S. armed forces since its implementation aer Viet-
nam. In the Counterinsurgency Leadership Survey, only 24 percent of Army
respondents and 10 percent of Marine respondents stated that their service
272 How to Win
oen chose company or battalion commanders for Iraq or Afghanistan who
were less likely to succeed in counterinsurgency than ocers not selected.15
Centralized selection boards have worked less well for the Afghan government
simply because President Karzai has repeatedly overridden them.
e other principal method of promoting merit-based command was to
put command selection directly in the hands of a senior leader committed to
voiding inappropriate criteria. Oentimes it was a chief of state or a cabinet
minister with broad powers. Ramon Magsaysay replaced large numbers of in-
competent commanders, including cronies of President Elpidio Quirino, with
able ocers, having insisted at the time of his appointment as secretary of
national defense that he have a free hand in personnel matters. General Carlos
Eugenio Vides Casanova, upon becoming Salvadoran defense minister in 1983,
took vigorous and rm actions that pushed merit ahead of graduation class in
command selection.
In other instances, particularly those involving foreign powers, the senior
military or political commander in the theater was best suited to hiring and
ring commanders. As with cabinet ministers, the rst challenge was convinc-
ing superiors to grant them complete authority to make leadership changes.
Sir Harold Briggs failed to see his plan through in Malaya because he lacked
this authority. His successor, Gerald Templer, secured that authority and used
it to replace droves of weak leaders with better ocers, which enabled him to
make great progress in the war using the same methods that Briggs had tried.
Relieving weak commanders was not as easy as it might appear to the
casual observer, even for senior leaders who had full authority to hire and re.
In many organizations reviewed here, the process required such burdensome
tasks or involved such large obstacles that it discouraged authorities from re-
lieving all but the very worst commanders. Firing a subordinate leader de-
manded a strong commitment to the greater cause, not to mention a consider-
able degree of emotional detachment, if not ruthlessness, for it oen meant
relieving a friend or a relative or a protégé whom the commander had nur-
tured. And relief oen meant not merely humiliation for the relieved com-
mander but career ruin. Adna Chaee, along with Magsaysay and Templer,
had the necessary dispassion. General William Westmoreland and many
others did not, and therefore their subordinate commanders were of lower
quality than they could have been.
Within both the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps, many of today’s ocers
believe that senior commanders are too reluctant to remove poor counterin-
How to Win 273
surgency leaders at the crucial upper levels of local command. In the Counter-
insurgency Leadership Survey, 59 percent of Army survey respondents and
49 percent of Marine respondents said that American company and battal-
ion commanders ought to be relieved for poor performance more oen.16
Furthermore, 51 percent of soldiers and 45 percent of Marines said that oner-
ous procedures for relieving commanders discouraged the removal of poor
commanders in their service.17 ese results suggest that the U.S. armed forces
should act promptly and powerfully to remove the barriers to relief of under-
performing commanders. Lives are at stake.
Although leaders like Magsaysay and Templer achieved great success
through wholesale changes in commanders, that method was far from univer-
sally applicable. Highly professional Western armed forces did not normally
have leadership problems of sucient magnitude to justify major purges. At
certain points in time during the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the
relief of weak indigenous leaders ended in failure because the replacements
were as bad or even worse. Mass relief of commanders also ran the risk of
creating such a fear of mistakes in other commanders that they would become
less aggressive or stop trying innovative methods, as occasionally occurred
in the Vietnam War. Some mistakes had to be tolerated in order to preserve
the initiative and creativity that are vital in counterinsurgency. Commanders
needed to supervise subordinate commanders closely to determine whether
mistakes resulted from sensible risk-taking or poor leadership, and whether
the successes outweighed the failures. When they decided to relieve a com-
mander, they had to make clear throughout the command that the relief re-
sulted from inadequate leadership rather than audacity or independence of
mind.
Overseers of counterinsurgencies also faced dicult choices concern-
ing retention of good commanders. With some organizations, like the U.S.
Army during the Philippine Insurrection, counterinsurgent leaders who dis-
tinguished themselves were oen kept in the eld, sometimes for the dura-
tion of the war if they agreed to stay. With others, all commanders, good and
bad, regularly rotated out of the war, and even the best commanders could be
kept out for several years or more. Frequent turnover was a serious problem
not only because it gave the most eective leaders no more time in the eld
than any others but also because commanders typically spent the rst months
of their tours taking in the environment and developing relationships with
local leaders, during which time their eectiveness was substantially below