COIN operated: in Iraq and Afghanistan, General David Petraeus applied all the lessons learned in Vietnam-except for the one that mattered most.

• Author: Colarusso, Laura M.
• Position: ON POLITICAL BOOKS - The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War - Book review

The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War

by Fred Kaplan

Simon & Schuster, 448 pp.

I' n late 2005, after a grueling year training Iraqi security forces, Lieutenant General David Petraeus returned to the U.S. to take on his next assignment. Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, unhappy with the general's growing media stature, wanted to ship him off to West Point, where he would have counted down the days to his retirement as the academy's superintendent in relative obscurity.

But fate--and the Army--had other plans for Petraeus, who was instead sent to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to run the Combined Arms Center, the main hub of the service's leadership development program. The post could have been seen as another career-ending disappointment, but General Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff at the time, advised his protege to think about it differently. From Leavenworth, he would have the authority to rewrite Army doctrine and revamp training standards. And it would give Petraeus, who took an interest in counterinsurgency operations early on in his career, the chance to reshape the military's futile approach to the bloody chaos engulfing Iraq and Afghanistan. "Go out there and shake up the Army, Dave," Schoomaker urged.

It's a small but pivotal moment in Fred Kaplan's new book, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War. Kaplan, who writes Slate's "War Stories" column, notes that Petraeus had been agitating for the Army to overhaul its attitude toward unconventional conflicts for two decades. In the late 1980s, he wrote his Princeton doctoral thesis about the lessons of Vietnam, concluding that the conflicts of the future would be smaller wars against amorphous enemies that blend in with civilians. As he rose through the ranks, Petraeus advocated for building up rapidly deployable light-infantry units, not the lumbering tank battalions the Pentagon was heavily investing in to thwart a Soviet invasion of western Europe. For the most part, his pleas to take counterinsurgency seriously fell on deaf ears.

Kaplan's book opens with an anecdote about tanks rolling across the Iraqi border during the first Gulf War, but his story really begins in the jungles of Vietnam, where nearly 60,000 Americans lost their lives fighting a bloody guerilla war with little support back home. So painful is the legacy of the American experience in Southeast Asia that it continues to color the military's perspective three decades on.

Generations of senior leaders within the Army have taken great pains to avoid getting drawn into another conflict with ill-defined goals and fuzzy battle lines. Their strategy was clear: they wouldn't train, equip, or otherwise prepare for a Vietnam-like counterinsurgency operation, in the hope that they wouldn't be asked to participate in one. It was against this backdrop that the Pentagon drew up plans to invade Iraq in 2003 while...