[lit-ideas] Re: David Petraeus

  • From: Eric <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:08:05 -0500

At least he's not sitting around cursing the darkness...



from Brian's link:

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals -- including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders -- in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.

Army officers tend to refer to the group as "Petraeus guys." They are smart colonels who have been noticed by Petraeus, and who make up one of the most selective clubs in the world: military officers with doctorates from top-flight universities and combat experience in Iraq.

Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents, who have criticized the way the service has operated there the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way.

<snip>

... the team being assembled by Petraeus promises to be both larger and more influential than anything seen in the U.S. war effort so far, both making plans and helping to implement them. The group's members are very much in the high-energy mold of Petraeus, whose 2003-04 tour commanding the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, the biggest city in northern Iraq, gave the U.S. military one of its few notable success stories of the war. He also holds a PhD in international affairs from Princeton University.

"I cannot think of another case of so many highly educated officers advising a general," said Carter Malkasian, who has advised Marine Corps commanders in Iraq on counterinsurgency and himself holds an Oxford doctorate in the history of war.


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