The U.S. Army’s new strategy in Iraq—launched in February 2007, along with a surge of 25,000 additional American troops—qualifies neither as particularly new nor even as a strategy. Better to call it, instead, an enhanced reliance on tactics and operational concepts previously in use. Or, put less charitably, an over-hyped shift in emphasis that, on the one hand, will not necessarily yield an American victory in Iraq but, on the other, might well leave the United States Army crippled in future wars.
Properly understood, the surge narrative is really not about Iraq at all. It is about the past and future of the U.S. Army. It resurrects dubious battlefield lessons from the past—Vietnam, principally—applies them to Iraq, and extrapolates from there into an unknown future. On all three counts—past, present, and future—the narrative suffers from numerous and irreparable defects. Its reading of the past, grounded in the cliché that General Creighton Abrams’s “hearts and minds” program “won” the war in Vietnam, is a self-serving fiction. Its version of the more recent past and even the present is contrived and largely fanciful, relying on a distorted version of both to tell a tale in which U.S. forces triumphed in Iraq in 2007 and did so despite the misguided efforts of their predecessors even a year before. More than anything else, the surge narrative stakes a claim on the future, instructing us that its methods of counterinsurgency will be uniquely suited to the next war and to the one after that.
From the surge, its most fervent advocates have extracted a single maxim: that they and only they have uncovered the secret to defeating insurgencies. Prior to the surge, in this telling, only a few exceptional units were engaged in proper counterinsurgent operations...
A (Slightly) Better War: A Narrative and Its Defects
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