 Well, it's a pleasure to be with you today. Long ago, I was on the faculty of the Naval War College as a Secna fellow and have fond memories of that year here. I also, because Fletcher School educates doctoral students as well as master students, I have several former doctoral students who teach right up the hill here. And I went in the bookstore, and I happened to see the book of one of those students, two of them actually, Toshi Yoshihara and Jim Holmes, Red Star over the Pacific, which is about the Chinese Navy. What I'm going to talk to you about today, have a conversation with you, is about the Marine Corps counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq in the period 2004 to 2008. And I always like to begin talking about my book by saying what it's not. And it's not a book on the entire war. It's not about how the war was fought everywhere. And it doesn't deal with the rationale for the war. I'm happy to talk about all those things. But the book is about Marines. And it's at the operational level. And I know many of you are familiar with this concept of the operational level and the strategy level. The study raises, from an academic point of view, the question that I tried to deal with is how the Marines were able to learn during war. And what the writing on military organizations at war and organizations in general is that they don't learn fast. And especially, this is said of military organizations, that they don't learn quickly. Yet the Marines were able to learn in a very short period. And so the theme of the book is what John said. And that is how the Marines adapted their operations and their strategy to a context in which they were not prepared. I'll say something about the operational plan that the Marines took with them in 2004. But the reality is that in 2004, when the Marine Corps prepared to go back to Iraq, they had been in Iraq as part of the march up. And after the Iraqi regime was toppled, the Marines redeployed to the southern part of Iraq. This is the Shia area. And it was a pretty peaceful time. This would be from late in the spring of 2003 until the fall of 2003 when most of the Marines were out of Iraq. So that period for them was rather tranquil. And in many ways, it had an impact on what they thought they would find when they went back to Iraq. So what I'm going to do is talk about that campaign. I sometimes like to begin by commenting on this issue of organizational learning. I won't go into that in much detail. This is more for teaching my students. I won't bore you with organizational theory except to say that it can be very boring, as, frankly, can most writing in some parts of academia. The Marine Corps says that it's a learning organization. This is part of the way that they think about them themselves. And in many ways, I would say that the Marine Corps has to be a learning organization because often it will find itself first in the fight. And so the Marine Corps, in many ways, at least my study of the Marine Corps, they assume that they will find themselves initially engaged without a clear understanding of the context and the enemy that they're facing. Victor Krulak, who wrote this book that I think every Marine has to read first to fight. I have not yet met a Marine officer who's come to study at the Fletcher School with me who hasn't read it. I ask every one of them when they arrive, have you read first to fight? Of course is the answer. Well, Victor Krulak said that the war you prepare for is rarely the war you get. And as a result, Marines have to be ready for uncertainty. And this, in my study of the Marine Corps, seems to be embedded in Marine Corps organizational culture. And so the narrative, the story I tell, is that of learning and adapting in a situation that was very different than the experience the Marines had when they were part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the march of the Baghdad, and the toppling of the regime. So what I'm going to do is pick up the narrative with how the Marines prepare to go to Anbar and what they accepted. And I'll talk about the campaign some. And then it might be more fun for all of us if we chat about this campaign after I lay out some of the specific findings. Now, one thing I would tell you, you might wonder, how is it that I came to do this? After all, I'm an academic from Boston. What am I doing with the Marine Corps? In addition to teaching at the Naval War College in the late 90s, I held a chair with the Marine Corps. It's called the Oppenheimer Chair. And I spent a year at Quantico. And when I was there, I got to know very well General Don Gardner, who was the president of the schools of Quantico. And we became very good friends. At that time, I was writing a book entitled The Secret War Against Hanoi. And it was the story of the covert action campaign that was conducted against North Vietnam during the Vietnam War by an organization called MacV Sog. Some of you may have heard of this organization, not necessarily the book, but the organization. And General Gardner, I got to be quite good friends. And I gave a series of lectures on this book. And then I did another book in around, I think, it was published around 2006 titled Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias, The Warriors of Modern Combat. And he invited me down to talk about that. And so we developed this friendship. And around 2008, we were having lunch. And we were talking about Iraq. And I said to him, I said, you know, it's very interesting, all of the discussion about the surge, the surge was going on at that time. You all know about the surge in general, Petraeus and the development of the new counterinsurgency doctrine. And what was interesting to me was that the Marine Corps in Anbar carried out a counterinsurgency campaign that looked exactly like the surge before the surge took place, but didn't really get much credit for it. And so I raised this. And he asked how I would study it. And I gave him some ideas about what kind of material I'd like to have access to. I found out that the Marine Corps does an excellent job of doing what I call a moral history, as you would probably call them, debriefings. But when a MEF comes out, when a Marine Expeditionary Force comes out of a deployment in Iraq, there is the Marine historians interview all the key officers to capture what they did there. And then, of course, there are the kind of normal unit reports and so on that are available. And I said to General Gardner that I'd like to have access to all of that. And he said, OK. So that's how I decided to work on this topic. And so what did I find? Well, I found that when the Marines prepared to go back to Iraq in March of 2004, they were going to send part of one MEF, so part of the first Marine Expeditionary Force, that their assessment of what they expected to find there can be characterized as a generally permissive environment. Now this is they're preparing their operational plan in the late fall and right after, in the late fall of 2003. And I interviewed the head of intelligence for the MEF, who said at the time, Anbar, which is in the news now, as you know quite a bit, is generally permissive, meaning that we don't expect much of a fight, although there are pockets of resistance. But the campaign plan for one MEF essentially expected to enter a relatively benign environment. Then Colonel Joe Dunford, of course, many of you will know the name Joe Dunford. He's now the ISAF commander in Afghanistan, General Dunford. I knew him when he was major Dunford. He studied with me at the Fletcher School. Joe said at that time he was the first Marine Division's chief of staff, and he was involved in the planning for this deployment. And he said in the interview, we were not talking about an insurgency at that point. The word insurgency wasn't used early in 2004. And so based on these suppositions, one MEF drew up a campaign plan for Anbar that essentially looked at Anbar as being in a post-conflict phase. So war was over. This was post-conflict. The campaign plan, once one MEF arrived in Anbar, they found quickly that the situation was much different. Now, how do we account for this bad assessment of the situation? And it really goes to how little the American intelligence community knew about Anbar, and about Iraq in general. And also the fact that there was nothing in Department of Defense planning and CENCOM planning that ever thought that there could be what I like to call a war after the war. See, they planned for the conventional war. But could there be a war after the war? And that idea was not part of the way the Department of Defense, the Office of Secretary of Defense or the intelligence community thought about the possibility that there could be a war after the war, an irregular war, an insurgency, terrorism, and so on. So the Marines found themselves in another one of those unforeseen conflicts. That's what General Prulak says. You're going to get there, and you're probably not going to be prepared for it. And the situation at the end of 2004 in Anbar was not good for the Marine Corps. They had won a major battle. This was the battle of Fallujah. And I talk about Fallujah and what went right there. And it's a very interesting battle. But in terms of dealing with a growing insurgency, the Marine Corps was locked in that old game called whack-a-mole, you know, whack-a-mole. Something pops up, you whack it, and it comes up over here. And that's what they were locked in 2004. And coming into 2005. They have enough forces. There were about the meh, which included an army brigade. It was about 25,000. And Anbar's a big place. And so when they found insurgents, they could eliminate them. But they couldn't hold the ground. And the problem was that they needed to be able to hold the ground. So they come into 2005. And 2005 is one of these important learning. I call it learning junctures, learning points for the Marine Corps. One meh, two meh, replaces one meh. And in this period of 2005, the Marine Corps gains ground truth about what's the nature of the enemy here that we're fighting, what's the nature of the adversary. And what's interesting is that they come to understand that this insurgency is not, you can't think of it as made up of just one perspective, or one element. But the insurgency is really a coalition. It's an interesting coalition of, now this is an Anbar, so this is all Sunni, no Shia here. It's all Sunni area. And the insurgency is made up in part of what I would call Sunni nationalists. These are some of them former regime members, members of the Army, who saw the US intervention and then the empowering of the Shia leadership in Baghdad as a great loss for themselves. And they organized and defied against American presence. They're also, in Anbar at this time, there's a large influx of internationalists. These are al-Qaeda members or men who identify with al-Qaeda. And Iraq and especially this Anbar region for al-Qaeda have become the central front in the global fight. Now this al-Qaeda organization believes they're in a global war and with the US intervention in Iraq, they saw this as opportunity. In their narrative they hoped to be able to inflict on the US what they believed was the defeat that they inflicted on the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan. Now this is a narrative who beat the Red Army in Afghanistan were not internationalists from different parts of the Muslim world but Afghans. But nevertheless they have this narrative and so their narrative was that Iraq could be the central front. And so you have these, they're sometimes called salafis. You have these jihadis who are showing up in Anbar and elsewhere in Iraq. There are Iraqis who adhere to this point of view as well. And they form a coalition. Often insurgencies are coalitions and not made up of just one faction. And that can be their weakness. This can be their weakness. Now what happens in Anbar is at the end of 2004, early 2005, al-Qaeda in Iraq and they're one of the factions now in this insurgency in Anbar. They want to take control of the insurgency. So they're in a partnership but now they want to take over because they see this fight in Iraq in a global sense. Now to take control of it, of course, the nationalist elements aren't necessarily in agreement with this. And I should step back and say that the insurgency worked in 2004 and into 2005 because there was this common enemy, which was the United States. But other than that, these different elements of the insurgency were what I like to call unnatural partners. They were unnatural partners. Well, many things there was big disagreement between these internationalists and local Sunni shakes and tribesmen. And when al-Qaeda made this power play to take over the insurgency, it created pushback from the nationalist elements of the insurgency. And al-Qaeda, in order to enforce their will, initiated a murder and intimidation campaign, especially against shakes. Shakes that were resisting their domination. They would murder them and their families too. Now this is a bad idea in tribal society because tribal societies, shakes are very important. And if you murder a shake, you're likely to get the whole tribe coming after you. And I can say that what this murder and intimidation campaign did was, it led some of these shakes to start to look elsewhere for help. And so in 2005, 2MF, which has now replaced 1MF, they begin to have conversations with some of the tribal leaders, shakes. And the marine leadership comes to the view that if we can get some of these tribes to provide men to us, we'll be able not just to find insurgents and kill them, but we'll be able to hold ground. And in counterinsurgency, it's very important to hold ground and to extend out. Some compare this to dropping a drop of oil on a cloth and you'll see it expand. And this is true in counterinsurgency. If in a counterinsurgency, you are simply clearing areas but not holding them, then they'll come back. They'll come back, insurgents will come back. And so you have to be able to not just clear, but you need to be able to hold. This is the nature of war when it takes this irregular unconventional form. And so in Iraq and in Anbar, it was what I call population centric warfare. And so if you can gain support in local areas, it will be a force multiplier. Now, of course, the Marine Corps had to do was to be able to understand who these tribes were and work with them. So in the fall of 2005, the Marine Corps leadership in Anbar began to have discussions with these tribal shakes. This is the origins of what's called the awakening. You probably have some of you have probably heard that term. The Anbar awakening, the Sunni awakening, which often is identified with the surge, which comes in. The surge begins in the spring of 2007. But the Marine Corps was involved with the awakening before it was actually called the awakening. But these shakes that became part of the awakening, which was to resist al Qaeda and the insurgency. So in 2005, then, one would say that the Marines recognized an opportunity. There was an opportunity. The insurgency was fragmenting. And this opened the door for this opportunity. And so began in November and December meetings between the two Mef leadership and some of the most important tribal shakes in Anbar. This is another one of these important learning points, or I call it learning junctures. Now, of course, what the Marines recognized was that in order to engage with the shakes and the tribes, that they were going to have to build this into their operational plan. And so what's very interesting is how what two Mef was learning in 2005 was coming back to one Mef, which was preparing to go back in 2006. And the cycle of learning here is very interesting. And it has an important impact on one Mef's plan for 2006. And so the Marine One Mef returns to Iraq in 2006. Now, this is the most interesting year. And let me comment a bit on this year. Many thought, including some important members of Marine intelligence, that Anbar was lost, that the Marines had lost Anbar, and that was that. This was at a time when one Mef was going back to Anbar with a new operational plan that sought to capitalize on the engagement that was taking place between the Marine leadership in Iraq at that time and the tribal leadership, some of the key tribes in Anbar. So you have this ironic situation on the one hand, you know, the one narrative, Anbar's lost. And another narrative, which is the narrative that I wrote about and others have written about. And that is that because of this understanding of the environment, the Marine Corps developed a new approach for 2006, it's a classic counterinsurgency approach. But in which engagement with the tribes of Anbar is seen as that important force multiplier? If you can get large numbers of tribesmen to serve in the Iraqi or the Anbar police, you'll be able to expand your control over Anbar. And as you do that, you will take control of the insurgency. And so this tribal engagement became a very important part of what the Marines did in Anbar in 2006. And the story of 2006 in Anbar is how one Mef executed this campaign plan and really turned the time, if you will, in that part of the war after the war in Iraq. And so what's interesting is that as 2007 begins in March and April of 2007, this is just as the surge is taking place in the Baghdad area and the army is adapting and employing this kind of counterinsurgency approach. The fight in Anbar drops precipitously, the number of acts of violence and so on go down quite a bit. And that's a key turning point. I interviewed General John Allen and others who were the commanders of two Mef that went back in 2007. And they didn't know when it was going to happen. You know, war is not a science. Some people try to think it is, but it's more art than a science. But they were ready so that when this violence did come down, then they could capitalize on it and help move the awakening into a consolidation period. So this is the story of Anbar. It's an important part of the war. It was a success at the operational level. It was not focused on a particular part of the fight. And now, of course, we see that Anbar is in the news quite a bit. The dean at the Fletcher School, Jim Stavridis, our new dean is former Saccur and Admiral Stavridis said to me the other day that I have to write a sequel, Al-Qaeda takes Anbar back. That's not a happy story. And I can comment on that, but this is what the book's about. It's about the Marine Corps encounter insurgency and how the Marine Corps, in this particular instance in Iraq, proved to be quite an adaptive organization that came to understand the adversary. They didn't understand what was going in. They figured it out and they were quite successful at the operational level. This was not overall US policy in Iraq. That's another story. So I'll stop with that and happy to have a conversation with you about this and Iraq more broadly, if you would like. Thank you. Please. Yes, you already agreed to insight into the politics, really, of the taking of Anbar. I'd always thought it was a tactical victory for the Marines, more than one that had a political component like this. What is the relative magnitude of the Marine forces compared to this supporting force that really allied with us? And could the Marines have taken the Anbar by themselves? Well, I think they answered the second question first. No, because it's an economy of force. Anbar is a huge place and it's an urban battle. If you go from Fallujah up the Euphrates all the way to the Syrian border, it was a big place to cover. So the Marines really needed help. And initially, the idea was that a reconstituted Iraqi army would have units deployed there. But the army that was reconstituting was Hevalishia. So that wasn't going to happen. So the answer was local tribal militias. And the tribes had these militias. And so they had to be mobilized. Now, the way that it would work is that Marines would take control of an area. They would secure it. And then these tribal militia would become the police. The Marines would be able to protect them against any major push. And they would pacify and secure and hold the area. So you definitely need numbers in these types of wars. One of the misconceptions in my own view now is that while the United States had a force that was more than adequate to defeat the Iraqi army, that force was way under a man for this war after the war. And so you need help. And that was important. Now, there is a war in politics, right? I mean, wars and politics are always connected. Policy and strategy taught up the hill here. And this was true in Anbar. The political understanding that Marines had to have and cultural understanding down to the platoon level was very important because they had to be able to interact. And this is a different culture with a different set of values. And so Marines had to be able to adapt to that. One of the several senior Marines really got this. But the person who I thought was most important, well, a couple, John Kelly, General Kelly, terrific insight and understanding, General Allen, General Dunford, and many others as well. So they understood the political dynamics that had to be understood and embraced if they were going to build a force that was able to secure this big area. Thank you. Yeah. You mentioned that the tribal people were mainly Shia. Well, the tribal people in Anbar are Sunnis. Oh, they are. They're Sunnis. The Shia, yeah, if you look at Iraq, if you look at a sectarian and tribal or ethnic map, there are areas that are almost exclusively Shia. And that's south of Baghdad. Then if you go west of Baghdad, Anbar, and then in some areas above Anbar, it's mainly Sunni. Then further up, it's Kurd. And then there's an area of overlap. And Baghdad is the center of this overlap. So in Anbar, these were Sunni, and not Shia, they're Arabs, but they're Sunni. Now, there are a certain type of Sunni in terms of their view of the Koran and the role of religion, which is different than the view that these al-Qaeda internationalists had. So complicated terrain. But that's in Anbar, it was Sunni. Now, one of the reasons why they didn't like the United States was that they saw the US empowering machine and putting them in power in Baghdad. So that's a whole other story, but an important aspect of it. The tribal people were Sunni, and yet they helped us. Yeah. Because of al-Qaeda, they thought that their view was that they wanted to institute a certain type of social order and political order in Anbar, and that that was it. And so I called a power play. They wanted to take over and control this insurgency for their own ends. And when there was some pushback from some of the shanks, they were vicious in what they did. I mean, it's awful, the cruelty with which they tried to enforce their will. And it backfired. I mean, I understand it is. It backfired. And so it was an opening. If this could be exploited, in order to exploit it, you had to embrace the context. Do you think the Sunni and the Shia are going very detachment? That's a big question. I had had hope, actually, for Iraq. Because what I think the US was able to accomplish there by 2009 was that they got these different factions to lower the violence. And to what I call cross the bridge from armed struggle to political struggle. Now, the political struggle going to take time to sort out what's the political end game for Iraq. But unfortunately, and now this is my assessment of it, I think you had to keep some presence there. We didn't keep presence there. And this opened Iraq, I think it allowed for this sectarianism to come back. And of course, there is an outside power that has been very important in pushing a sectarian fight in Iraq, and that survived. So I don't have an answer to it. But the way things are going in Iraq and Syria, it's not good. If you back up a little bit, and this may be naive on my part, but I'm trying to envision this. We go back once upon a time, you had Persia, as it were, in this large area that wasn't, as far as I know, that much part of the World War II, let's say, when there was this huge conflagration. That was the European area. So now you're breaking into the in-between area. And you've got all these different tribes, almost like, if you picture American Indians or something, and all their separate tribes and their groups. And suddenly, we have these artificial countries established after World War I. All right, but all right. I mean, that's the hard part. So I don't know quite how that happened. That's my weakness, I guess. But to try to picture how suddenly you're taking these different tribes and groups of people that have been able to live by themselves for generations and generations. And you create these countries. Right. And then all of a sudden, well, now we've got to get along with one another. And just stay in our own section. We've got to get along. And there's intermarriage. And there's all kinds of stuff happening. And so they're forced into this artificial situation. And so you're bound to have, like, essentially, effectively civil wars, are you not? Well, I mean, this is really complex. That's all I'm getting at. Yeah, no, your question is the right one. And this goes to how those nations were created in the first place, which was after World War I. And under the League of Nations, they created what they called mandates. It was, in many ways, a way of colonial powers keeping control of the British and French over these areas. And they created countries that were not homogeneous. But that's true in many parts of the world. If you look at the new countries that emerged after World War II, very few were completely homogeneous. So there has to be some kind of political development in place. And unfortunately, the story of this region in particular is that that kind of political development, which means that different elements come to some agreement on common principles and so on. Just didn't happen. You had military dictatorships in several of these in Iraq who bought this for power for quite a long time. They represented one particular part of this makeup. And so you have a history of this confrontation. This is not easy to sort out. Did the rules of engagement create a problem for the Marines? Well, what the Marines, of course, realized was that you can't stay in. You can't commute to the war, this is what the traitors used to say. You have to put yourself on the ground and stay there. And so this had a problem. Of course, this can undermine force protection. And yeah, it had the rules of engagement were an important issue because, of course, we think about conflict. We want to limit our casualties. But in these sorts of wars, you have to engage in the population. And so it's hard. And then how you use force, it's also a big issue. And the other side is good at trying to get you to do things that hurt your reputation because they fight in and among the population. So rules of engagement in these kinds of conflicts very, very hard. And it's something that the Marine Corps had to deal with. Has the climate and our been fairly stable recently or have re-lost everything? No, it's terrible now more. What you had is al-Qaeda coming back. It's not good. And it kind of illustrates what's happening now in Syria and Iraq together. So there's a wider fight that's taking place. But no, Anwar is not good. And it's unclear whether the Iraqi government can get control of that area. I love Skype. You can Skype with everyone. I spent a lot of time Skype with the former national security advisor in Iraq. And we were, he was saying about two weeks ago, that getting their hands around that situation is very difficult. Yes? To carry that a little bit in a different direction, first went in there. And we simply gone in, said to the Iraqis, as soon as we get Saddam and the rest of the 12 folks wanted in our second part. And make sure they don't go deep-floating around. We're out of here. And we had done that. What do you think the state of Iraq would be today? Yeah, I don't have a crystal ball. But this is what I hear from some of the Iraqis that I've dealt with over the years, that that's what we should have done. But we did things that made withdrawing difficult because of the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the disbanding of the government. We created, we facilitated instability. The year 2003 in my book, I characterized US policy in Iraq in 2003, really, from the takedown of government. My title is All the Wrong Moves. And of course writers like that have to catch chapter titles. But in any ways, you could look at US policy in Iraq in 2003 after the following issue was doing things that then made it hard to get out. We actually, I mean, that was Rob Schultz's plan. We had everyone out by August of 2003, he got the money to buy it. Several years down the road. It's kind of like the Kaiser, who said everyone will be home by November. And they were, but it was four years later. The same with the Kaiser. So I think that we made some mistakes there. What if we had done that? That's counterfactual. I don't know, but I do know that when we did there in 2003, I facilitated this insurgency. And the Iraqis paid a big price. Was the reading still there? We're out. We're out. Now there's some talk. Because of this awful situation in Syria now, it's creeping down into Iraq, and there has been some discussion recently about the US put some forces back in Iraq. I don't expect it, because I think that Washington approached this war in Iraq, it's not our war. And so I can't imagine it, and we engage in it. Suppose we'd gone ahead in the first Gulf War to Baghdad. I don't know, I've studied that war quite a bit. What was so interesting about that war was that two of our allies really were so strong against us doing that. And they were important allies, one was Saudi Arabia, the other was Turkey. It just seems that we leave these wars when they're half done. Then we have to go back. Well, in that case, I think we thought we could use tools that would contain that situation. And we deal with the big question, which was the WND question in 1991. If you look at the UN agreement that was signed, one important aspect of that was that inspectors were supposed to be able to have free and unfettered access so that you could ensure that chemical and biological weapons would be kept. And of course, the problem with that is that the UN being controlled around. And so Saddam was able to keep that issue from being resolved, which becomes an issue after 2001. All of a sudden, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction become the basis for intervening in Iraq. So not having solved that problem in the aftermath ends up being a precipitant of the key factor for the intervention in 2003. So in many ways, these wars are connected in ways that if you had resolved the WND question, then the rationale for intervening in Iraq, which turned out to be, of course, not true. There wasn't a WND, but the assumption was that it would. Thank you very much.