How Petreaus prepped to command in Iraq

Question: How did you come to the “big ideas” when you were in command in Iraq?

Petraeus: Well, first of all is what I did to get the big ideas right in my own head. To help our Army and indeed the Marine Corps—because we did this in partnership with General Mattis and the US Marine Corps—what we sought to do to help those institutions develop the right big ideas as well. So during that fifteen month period that I was back in the United States [commanding the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth], having returned from a fifteen-and-a-half month tour as a three star heading the train and equip mission in Iraq, we spent a great deal of time working our way through ideas and concepts of what the strategy should be. This included the counterinsurgency field manual, and it included articles for Military Review magazine—indeed we had a writing contest for counterinsurgency using Military Review which was also under my purview at that time. We worked very, very hard and with considerable rigor to try to get this set in our heads so when I actually did deploy—you know, I’d been told that it was quite likely I was going to go back to Iraq. There was only one position to which I could return presumably, and that would be to be the commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq. The call came, frankly, a bit earlier than I expected when the President decided to conduct the surge, and decided to make a change in leadership.

But when I went back over there, and having already had nearly two-and-a-half years on the ground, I had a pretty good idea—as did our other leaders, who had been seized with this issue for a number of years. Most of the commanders who came to Iraq during the surge had at least one tour, one full-year tour on the ground by then. Many had two. And so we were a reasonably experienced group, and, again, we’d worked our way through this. We’d made the doctrinal changes, we’d tweaked our organizations, we’d overhauled the training, the so-called road to deployment, every activity along it. We’d completely changed our leader development courses. And so we’d made a number of institutional changes to ensure our leaders and our units were prepared for the tasks required in Iraq and of course in Afghanistan as well.


Lesson: perhaps to give people lots of time to prepare for new positions, and the freedom to rethink ideas.

Interview at the Belfer Center at Harvard

http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/issues/Winter_2015-16/10_Petraeus.pdf