 our Vice President for External Relations. I'm so glad to see all of you here today for this important book talk with these two just terrific military analysts, scholars, authors, and I want to tell you a little bit about both of them. Mark Moyer, Dr. Moyer is a historian and analyst of Contemporary National Security Affairs. He's the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism and Professor of National Security Affairs at the Marine Corps University of Quantico. His previous books include Triumph Forsaken, The Vietnam War, 1954 to 1965, and Phoenix and the Birds of Prey, Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam. Mark's articles have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other publications. You may have seen his op-eds in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in the last couple months about Afghanistan. Mark is a Harvard grad and received his PhD from Cambridge. His new book, A Question of Command, which we're going to be discussing today, Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq, is really a must read and judging from the response here, I can see that you guys are all very interested and we'll get to it in just a bit. Tom Ricks, who is near and dear to our hearts here at CSIS. Tom, as you may know, is one of the great military journalists of all time. He's been with The Washington Post. Before that, he was with The Wall Street Journal for 17 years and he's been part of two Pulitzer Prize winning teams, one with The Journal, one with The Washington Post. Of course, Tom wrote his seminal book, the seminal book on Iraq, Fiasco, here at CSIS when he was a writer in residence and we've always been very grateful for his guidance and his policy expertise. Tom is now at the Center for a New American Security, a plastic think tank, national security think tank based here in Washington and he's also a contributing editor to Foreign Policy Magazine where he writes one of the best blogs anywhere. It's called The Best Defense and I strongly urge that you go to foreignpolicy.com if you haven't to take a look at it. Of course, Tom grew up in New York and Afghanistan and is a graduate of Yale. Question of Command, Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq. Mark's latest book, A Question of Command, presents a wide-ranging history of counterinsurgency from the Civil War and reconstruction to Afghanistan and Iraq, making it really one of the most timely books out there today. Through a series of case studies, Mark identifies the ten critical attributes of counterinsurgency leadership and reveals why these attributes have been much more prevalent in some organizations than others. Mark also explains how the U.S. military and America's allies in Afghanistan and Iraq should revamp their personnel systems in order to elevate more individuals with those kind of attributes. With that, I'd like to introduce Dr. Mark Moyer, who will deliver some comments. Thank you, Andrew, very much for that kind introduction and thanks to CSIS for hosting this event. Thanks to Tom Ricks for offering to discuss this talk today. As was mentioned, this is really perfect timing for a book on this subject. In fact, it's not just because the interest in balloon boys started to wane, but in fact we do stand at a crossroads in Afghanistan, and we face problems there which I think are at their core questions of leadership. I think also the solutions to those problems will probably have a lot to do with leadership. I'm going to first talk a little bit about how I came about writing this book. Now I'm going to go into detail on some of the points in the book that I think are particularly relevant as we think about how we move forward in Afghanistan. I arrived at the U.S. Marine Corps University in the middle of 2004, and like most recent PhDs my interests were somewhat narrow. I had been working on Vietnam War for quite some time. But coming in there we began to overhaul the curriculum that involved putting much more emphasis on counterinsurgency because we had a lot of new Marines coming in from Iraq. The new director who came in had actually served in the First Battle of Fallujah, the one where Americans, Marines went in and were stopped halfway. And I was put in charge of a course that focused on counterinsurgency and looked particularly at foreign cultures and at interagency operations. And in order to do that I had to go sort of outside my comfort zone and look at a lot of other insurgencies that I wasn't all that familiar with and ended up for the course picking a lot of the cases that actually appear in the book. So we tested some of them, found some were better than others and I've included the ones that I think are most helpful. And in the course of teaching this I got to talk to lots of Marines. We also have a lot of Army, Air Force, Navy, Civilian, International students. And it was really an eye-opening experience. In the course of putting together this course and teaching it I came to the conclusion that we were not teaching them in many cases everything that we ought to be doing. And I had reached a similar conclusion about Vietnam from working on that but if you look at the literature on the Vietnam War and many of these other wards a lot of it's more written for academics than for practitioners of counterinsurgency. There's an inordinate emphasis on strategy and abstract theories and I think a lot of times far too much effort is spent on doing things like defining terms. So I wanted to do something that was really of great use to the practitioner and the thing that ultimately pushed me into stopping work on Vietnam to do this book was the outbreak in violence in Iraq after the Samara bombings in 2006. And you probably remember seeing the images of dead corpses in Baghdad streets dozens of them every night. American casualties going way up. That was what finally inspired me to get cracking on a question of command. The book is largely historical. As I mentioned I'm a historian and so there are nine historical cases the last two being Iraq and Afghanistan up to 2008. And it does draw at the end some general lessons from those various cases although I point out repeatedly that in counterinsurgency there are very few instruments that will work in all cases so an important part of the leadership is being able to figure out when you can use those particular methods. The first case I'm going to talk about is the Malayan emergency of 1948 to 1960. And I'm going to start in the middle of that insurgency in October 6th of 1951. So on that date the British High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney decided to take a trip to Fraser's Hill which is about 65 miles outside the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. He went in a four vehicle convoy but on the way two of the vehicles had to stop for technical reasons but they pressed on and when they came to a turn in the road where they had to almost come to a stop their vehicles were ambushed by 38 gorillas and Gurney's wife stayed in the car he decided to try to make a run for it and was shot down and shot dead. And this was a catastrophic loss for the counterinsurgency at that time Malaya was still a British colony and so this was the supreme authority in the country being killed and ambushed by the enemy. The war was already going against them so it seemed like things just really could not get any worse in Malaya. Something very important happened just a few weeks later and that was that Winston Churchill returned to the position of Prime Minister after elections in Britain and Churchill being a man with a keen eye for talent selected Sir Gerald Templar to go out and take command of the counterinsurgency and everyone knows that Templar came in and within a matter of months had turned the counterinsurgency around and by the time he left 28 months later the counterinsurgents were on the road to victory. Now the question of how he did it is much less well understood and there's a common argument that what he really did was that he codified some best practices put them into a counterinsurgency manual and the distribution of this manual helped them figure out how to defeat the enemy and in fact you'll see that interpretation in the Army Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual FM324 and part of the reason that manual was written because of this belief that Templar's manual had been the be all and all in Malaya. But I did some digging into this in the process of working on the book and I found that that interpretation just was not quite correct because if you look at their strategy they used something called the Briggs Plan. The Briggs Plan had actually been in effect since 1950 and the tactics they used in fact were not any different. They had in previous years developed some tactics based heavily on what had been learned in Palestine and Burma and Southern Africa. So how was it then that he was able to use strategy and tactics that had failed in the past in order to achieve success in the future? Well the answer is that he was able to make dramatic improvements in leadership quality down to the local level. He did at first start at the top, he fired his top subordinate Vincent Del Tufo who was described as the Secretary of State for Colonies as a man who has no power of command and gives out no inspiration and is of course quite useless as Chief Secretary. Templar II were the countryside, he spent a lot of his time in what we now call battlefield circulation. He went out and questioned officers to see who knew what was going on and he was not hesitant to fire people on the spot. There was quite a lot of room for opportunity here. Among the people he fired were an officer who he described as an awfully nice fellow but quite gaga and another whom he called absolutely burnout and useless although a nice chap. Templar was a fairly ruthless individual but I think that's what the situation demanded. He brought in a new team of upper management and in this he was greatly assisted by Winston Churchill who promised to let him have the best and the brightest from the British Empire. So he went and looked all across Britain's far-flung possessions for top leaders and for example they picked a new commissioner of police who happened to be the police chief in London who was a fantastic individual. At lower ranks he imported British and Australian officers from various places to lead not only British troops but also Indigenous forces and this is I think a market contrast to what we've seen lately in our own personnel systems. We've heard General McChrystal talk about how he can't get anything out of the Pentagon and to get people out of there it takes months and we're still I think operating on a peacetime personnel system to a large extent. Templar also by spending so much of his time out in the field served as an inspirational force and many of the officers who were there testified to just the electrifying effect that he had by going out and talking to people. He also spoke a lot to the population and then in most cases also had a positive effect on him although there was the occasional slip-up. At one village where the guerrillas had ambushed government forces Templar showed up and declared you're a bunch of bastards and the interpreter translated this as his excellency informs you that he knows that none of your mothers and fathers were married when you were born. And then Templar continued, you may be bastards but you'll find out that I can be a bigger one which was translated as his excellency does admit however that his father was also not married to his mother. As a result of Templar's personnel changes and his contagious spirit the government started collecting a lot more intelligence on the insurgents. They were patrolling more aggressively and they denied, started denying the insurgents access to the population forced them to live in the jungle where you maybe think they're okay in the jungle but in fact there was almost nothing edible in the jungle so food supply became a big problem for them and led to their attrition. So as I said by the time he leaves there the insurgents are headed towards defeat. So question of command uses this case and the eight other cases to first of all put forward an alternative view of how you win counterinsurgency one that is really significantly different from the main schools of thought right now. One of those schools of thought is known as the population centric also known as the hearts and minds there's also the enemy centric view I'll talk about those in a minute but I argue that the key encounter insurgency is leadership and especially at the local level and these leaders have to be adaptive and that means you cannot you don't rely heavily on doctrine or on theories to figure out what has to be done. And we've seen encounter insurgency and again in Iraq and Afghanistan that we've had the most success when the authority was pushed down to the lowest levels because of the complexity of the situation and this also means by the way that you don't have to have necessarily a strong central government as a lot of people seem to think we need to have it in Afghanistan. If you look at the successes in Iraq in 2006-2007 in terms of when in particular in terms of gaining the participation of local elites the American commanders there and the Iraqi commanders had oftentimes had almost no connection to the central government. We'll say a good central government does help and talk more about that as well because central authorities do often select the commanders or do things that can help or hinder them. Now the population centric view argues that what you really need to succeed in counterinsurgency is you need to create governmental legitimacy and you do this by social and economic and political reforms that will bring an end to the population's grievances and they also believe that you should minimize the use of force because force tends to alienate the population. And I do agree that gaining people support is important but I tend to take a different view of how you do that. I think security is a big part of it and also good governance and virtuous governance but not these big social and economic programs. If you look in Afghanistan foreign governments and charities and the UN have poured tons of money into these big social programs economic development programs and it's had very little effect on the insurgency and people have been more concerned with number one security whether their lives going to be at stake. They've also been more concerned about how they've been treated especially by the Afghan national police which has been engaged in a lot of criminal activity. As one Afghan researcher put it people don't care if the roads are paved with gold. They would rather have security. After the population centric school which incidentally is a big part of the counterinsurgency manual the next most popular is the enemy centric school which holds that the key is really using force to destroy the insurgents and that once you do that things will be fine. And I do agree with some of the main points of the enemy centric view I think it is critical that you kill or capture a large number of the insurgents because we see time and again in most cases you're going to have to do that. And I think it's also the case that popular opinion and popular attitudes shift according to security it's actually beneficial to you if you can direct force at the enemy and not at the civilian population. And if you look at major sites of success in Iraq like Al Qaim and Ramadi, Talifar you see that there was very extensive force used at the beginning of those engagements and to some extent throughout those engagements. I think the idea of fighting without winning I don't think applies in most cases. And this is also I think very relevant to Afghanistan because we hear a lot of talk now about how we should opt for reconciliation but I don't think you can have the reconciliation in most cases without having the security first and I think that is part of what General McChrystal is thinking on this issue as well. So how did I arrive at this leader centric view? I covered a lot of that in the book I won't belabor it now because it's less important than some of the other things I like to talk about but if you look at particular conflicts for example Malaya you'll see that as the quality of the leadership goes up and down the effectiveness and counter-insurgency tends to go up and down and it has greater impact than anything else on the state of affairs of the war. And I'd say that other things aren't significant you know resources for example can be very important but it's a critical variable and if you also look at individual cases where you had one commander replaced by someone else and you have very different results usually that's the function of individual leadership. The bulk of the book is really devoted to how do we improve leadership in counter-insurgency because that's really what we want especially for practitioners, for policy makers and this is actually something that really has not been done in any sort of systematic way. Now one of the first things I do is look at what are the challenges to getting rid of underperforming leaders because you know sometimes you might think well it's easy all you do is you just fire these people and no brainer but you've got a lot of things that prevent that from happening first of all you have sympathy factor often times the commanding officers will develop a close relationship with their subordinates and they've also probably invested a lot of time in helping develop that person so they may be reluctant for that reason. In a lot of countries the commanders have friends or relatives in high positions in the government and those people are going to protect them and often times there's a fear that if you fire too many people you're going to inhibit initiative and you may undermine morale it takes I think very tough as well as smart commanders to break through these obstacles but Templar is a fine example of that another I think was Ramon Magsaysay in the Philippines Magsaysay like Templar spent a lot of his time in the field he would go around in fact he would often times wear a loha shirt and so no one would know who he was at least from a distance and he would show up unannounced to see what was going on if he found the troops were sitting around doing nothing or they were out there stealing chickens that commanding officer was going to get demoted or fired certainly. Magsaysay also was willing to fire his friends and relatives which is something that is often times not the case and Karzai is a good example of someone who is not particularly interested in doing that and at one point Magsaysay's generals came to him and said these changes are starting to demoralize the army and Magsaysay's reply was I don't care if they're bad then I'm going to demoralize them some more. Now in most of the books cases there's also quite a few instances where political considerations outweigh merit in how commanders are chosen and sometimes especially in the military there's a tendency to say well that's terrible how dare we let that happen and certainly it can be damaging in many ways but we also do have to keep in mind that war is ultimately a political activity and so there are cases where politics maybe should trump merit and our own civil war is an excellent example of that. Abraham Lincoln gave generalships to a lot of inexperienced politicians in the north in order to get their help in recruiting people from their state getting votes and so forth. I think they ultimately at the higher level you have to come up with some sort of balance between merit and between these political considerations. Now in Afghanistan I think there hasn't been that balance in many cases and the Karzai government has not put merit ahead often enough. In the book I also go into a lot of detail on what foreign powers e.g. the United States and Afghanistan can do in order to help improve the leaders of their indigenous allies and we know in Afghanistan Iraq the indigenous allies have had severe leadership problems. Surprisingly this has often been ignored by senior officials in particular in the United States. In Vietnam after we entered the ground war in 1965 General Westmoreland basically ignored the leadership of the South Vietnamese forces for several years and let them try to sort it out which seemed to be a nice gesture of deference towards South Vietnamese sovereignty but the reality was it allowed problems to fester. In Iraq we know in the early years CPA did not pay very close attention to who the Iraqis were choosing as police commanders or national guard commanders with very unfortunate results. Now smarter great power allies have come up with a variety of timed ingenious ways to deal with this problem and some of them are worth I think considering in Afghanistan although again I would emphasize that ultimately the senior decision makers should have the greatest knowledge and need to look at all the different options that have worked in the past and try to come up with ideas about what might work here. The highest risk and highest reward was the use of covert action to actually replace the chief of state. And this has worked sometimes in Vietnam it was actually a catastrophic failure in 1963 we orchestrated the overthrow of South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Siam and turns out he was actually better than a lot of people thought and the people after him were a lot worse and the war really went downhill drastically after that and we saw also lots of people being purged from the government because they were seen having been loyal to Siam. A milder form of action that's been used was used in El Salvador where we funneled money into the political campaign of one of the presidential candidates Jose Napoleon Duarte and that money allowed him to overtake his main rival in the poll and ultimately proved to be a blessing for the counter insurgency. We got a more recent example which has been disclosed and people like Tom Ricks have talked about it but I think a lot of people don't remember this but in 2006 the United States through pressure in various means orchestrated the removal of Iraq's first democratically chosen prime minister Ibrahim Iljafari. I should hasten to add that he I think fully deserved to be kicked out. He was known for filling his government with these Shiite militia leaders the ones who created these secret prisons and were out there killing all sorts of people for sectarian reasons. We also know that during one critical meeting where lots of things had to be decided he decided to spend three hours talking about whether tomato paste should be introduced as part of the rations for Ramadan. That was actually I think a good use of our diplomatic leverage. Another thing that's often worked well is promising additional aid and this tends to work better than the threat of withdrawing aid because it's seen as a lesser infringement on sovereignty but it has worked very well. In the Huck Rebellion we used the promise of extra aid to get them to change their Secretary of National Defense and the person we got installed was Radmon Magsaysay who turned the war around almost single-handedly and a huge success. We may need to think about other uses of aid in this way in Afghanistan. For example, if we want to try to get some sort of power-sharing between Karzai and Abdullah, think also to influence who becomes part of the Cabinet. Again, Secretary of, in this case, the Defense Minister or the Interior Minister can be crucial and we've got two good people in those positions in Afghanistan right now and Karzai did promise to give away some of the Cabinet positions during the election to buy people's favor so that's going to be a huge issue going forward. There have also been instances where foreign governments have tried to influence the whole way that leaders are selected and in Afghanistan it was recognized pretty early on that Karzai was giving out too many jobs to his friends, to his relatives, to members of his tribe. So the World Bank and NATO got together and said, we're going to force you to adopt a merit-based hiring system. And so Karzai said, okay, fine, we'll do that. But they had to have the Afghans involved at some level and it turns out that Karzai and some of the other senior leaders ended up skirting the system. For example, there would be tests for officers and they would take the test answers and sneak them to their friends. So without a high-level buy it really was not all that effective. A more effective way that requires more pressure on the host government is to actually control who their commanders are. And we did this in Vietnam with the Provincial Reconnaissance Unit program. And by the CIA selecting the leaders of these elite paramilitary forces we were able to remove the influence of politics and these forces were outstanding. They were the most effective in collecting information from the people, extremely effective at ambushing. The model we've used most often is also the one with the least risk which is simply trying to use persuasion of our allies. And I found, particularly in the case I studied in the book, that this depends heavily on the quality of personal relationships. And so the ambassador, the senior military leader in the country tend to be very important in particularly, you know, what sort of social skills do they have? Do they have the right kind of personality that they can engage that foreign leader? And it suggests, I think, too, that we be wary of efforts to try to bring in people from out of the country for important diplomatic missions like special envoys and senators and so forth, though apparently that has worked lately in at least one case. But if you look at Vietnam, for example, you had very highly personable individuals like Edward Lansdale or William Colby who got very close to the South Vietnamese president and were able to convince him to do a lot of things the United States wanted him to do. You know, on the other end, you had some who were standoffish, who didn't have social skills, some of whom were actually rude to the South Vietnamese president and sometimes the South Vietnamese president would actually do the opposite of what we wanted just because he was so offended. Ambassador Elbridge Durbrot was probably the worst of these. In fact, he was so bad, the chief of the American military mission said that Durbrot was better suited to be the senior salesman and a good lady's shoe store than to be representing the U.S. and an Asian country. Now, when you don't have a cadre of experienced leaders to draw on and you want to build forces quickly, which is what we face now in Afghanistan, you do want to spend a lot of time on developing leaders. And the important thing to stress here is that it is time-consuming because a lot of people assume you can just sort of create all these new forces out of nowhere. And what you can do is you can train and equip these forces, you can give them weapons and uniforms, but you can't create the leaders you need in that short timeframe. Typically, you need at least 10 years, a lot of people would say 15 to 20 years to build people like battalion commanders, district police chiefs, and those are the senior commanders at the local level and are really crucial in counterinsurgency. If you don't have that experienced leadership, what happens is your experienced leaders get spread way out. You end up having to give authority to officers who just don't have the experience or may not have the talent either. And we saw this example in El Salvador. Insurgency started there in 1980, and somebody said, well, hey, there's more insurgents. Let's double the security forces. That sounds like a great idea, which is similar to what we heard today. But the problem is that they didn't have the leaders and they didn't have a lot of Americans there to help out either. And so you created these forces, but a lot of them ended up getting involved in death squads that were going around, gunning people down, civilians, necessarily closely tied to the insurgency. And this not only fueled opposition in El Salvador, but also created opposition in the U.S. Congress, which made it more difficult to get aid for the war. This time factor has also been ignored when people have tried to introduce a whole new elite class and supplant the old elites in trying to run a country. In Iraq, we removed the bathists and the leadership of the Iraqi military and brought in exiles and other people who didn't have a whole lot of experience running country, and this was very ably chronicled by Tom Ricks and Fiasco. We saw how disastrous that was. Another good example, actually, is reconstruction after the Civil War, which I found to be a fascinating case, and we have, by the way, introduced it in our curriculum, and a lot of people never thought about it. It's counterinsurgency, but the parallels to a lot of other experiences, including Iraq, are pretty striking. The radical Republicans in Congress decided that they had enough of the southern white elites, and so they banned them from voting, and they brought in the so-called carpetbaggers and scallowags and freemen to run the government without really thinking about whether these people really had the qualifications to run the government, and you ended up seeing a lot of the same things we've seen in Afghanistan recently, in fact, corruption on a massive scale, ineptitude, voter fraud, the use of mood-altering substances. On the back then, it was alcohol rather than the marijuana you see in Afghanistan. And these ineffective reconstruction elites also allowed crime to flourish, and the former Confederate officers were particularly upset by this, as was the population, and so they formed their white militia organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan and many others, initially as vigilante organizations that were going to restore law and order. In fact, I think it's very similar to what happened in Afghanistan in certain ways, in that the Taliban has been able to make a lot of inroads because they've been pretty good at maintaining order and providing trials when the government's not been able to do that. And in reconstruction, the insurgents didn't prevail militarily, but in something we should keep in mind with Afghanistan, what they did do is they eroded the will of the North to the point where the North finally said, well, we're going to do what we would now call reconciliation. We're going to bring these southern whites back into the government, and so they did that, but they ended up losing everything that they had gone there to get in the first place, which was a quality for blacks. In fact, the Jim Crow laws that came in after that were actually worse than what had been there before radical reconstruction began. Now, given the size of Afghanistan's security forces today and the plans that we have for expanding them, there is a definite leadership void that we need to try to find a way to fill somehow so that they're not out there terrorizing people or getting involved in drug activity and so forth. Now, the U.S. government seems to have ruled out the possibility that we will use American officers in command of those units, but there have been many instances where Americans have become essentially the de facto leaders of those troops, whether they're advisors attached to them or they may be in a so-called partnering arrangement, but because the Afghan commander is inexperienced or inept, the American essentially calls the shots. There are other cases where the Afghans do have some decent leaders, but nonetheless you need to have Americans there to do certain things, technical things the Afghans maybe can't do. It also is very beneficial to have a lot of heavily armed Americans there because that makes the Afghans more comfortable to go out and get things done. And the Americans are there to keep an eye on the Afghans and see that they're going out and patrolling like they say they are and that they're not going up, setting up these roadside checkpoints where they shake people down. And I think this need for American forces to bolster the Afghan forces is really the most compelling argument we have as to why there ought to be more Americans in Afghanistan. And lastly, I'm going to talk about the U.S. side of the equation and the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps don't suffer from the gross leadership problems I've described in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, but they still do have some significant problems which I address in particular in the latter part of the book. I think the Army and Marine Corps have been too tolerant of poor leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan and in order to get some hard data for the book I did a survey of American officers who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan and this is published in the last part of the book. And there's some very interesting things that came out of this and one of them was that 59% of the Army veterans and 49% of the Marines said that their service ought to relieve commanders for poor performance more often than is currently the case. There's a number of reasons for this. One is that the procedures involved can be very onerous. There's also the sympathy factor I mentioned earlier. People feel they've invested in someone or they simply are a little too kindhearted to fire someone. There's also the fact that today if you get relieved it's probably going to kill your career in the military which wasn't always the case and that's something we might want to think about reconsidering. The military I think in particular the Army have also not been promoting the right types of officers in the way I think they should. They're not promoting the people who are intuitive outside the box thinkers who are good at creating innovative solutions who are good at complex problem solving and I think that in this respect they could learn some things from the business world. I worked in the business world for a few years and I was struck by the fact that a lot of the more effective companies spent a lot of time trying to match personalities to tasks. They used personality tests like Myers-Briggs and many knockoffs of that to try to find the person who's got the sales personality and get them to sales, the person who's got the engineering mentality get them into engineering and so on. The US military does administer these tests and we talk about them a lot at the school in fact that's how I got interested in this at first because actually at first when I heard about these tests I thought it was a bunch of bologna but actually I think it is a very useful way of managing personnel. The military I think particularly needs this because the military's tests show that the military's dominated by a certain group of personalities which in the Myers-Briggs term are known as sensing judging. These are people who rely mainly on the five senses to tell them about the world. They like details. They like a lot of facts and structure. They like doing things with standing operating procedures if you think of Danny Glover and Lethal Weapon or any of the other police chiefs who are insisting that things be done by the book. That's the kind of person we're talking about and they also tend to like 200 slide PowerPoint presentations and they like to haggle over the font size and the color. You will see there's been more research done on this in the business world so I do rely on a fair amount of that and I think it's very interesting. Organizations that are dominated by these sensing judging individuals tend to rely on standardization. They like to use plans that are based on past experience and this tends to work well if you're dealing with an activity that doesn't require a lot of change and you don't have an environment that's fluid like for instance construction or if you're talking in the military world something like supply. It does not work so well but we've got organizations that are in a changing environment have to deal with ambiguity. Computer software in the civilian world is a good example and I think counterinsurgency is the prime example in the military world. Sensing judging organizations also tend to be more averse to taking risks and another interesting finding from the counterinsurgency survey was that only 28% of the army respondents said that their service actually encouraged commanders to take risk which is a huge problem counterinsurgency because initiative and risk taking are fundamental. Now if you look in the business world there's really two types of organizations. One is the sensing judging and the other one is called intuitive thinking with a lot of people in the leadership who fall into the intuitive thinking category and these individuals instead of relying on their physical senses tend to use intuition to understand the world. They look at, focus on abstract ideas and the big picture they find rigid structures and standard procedures to be unnecessarily confining. Think about someone like a Theodore Roosevelt or a Steve Jobs or Erwin Rommel. They tend to like concise memos that get to the heart of the matter instead of these massive PowerPoint presentations and they don't care much for the 14 step processes that other people like to use. And the organizations that have intuitive thinkers at the top tend to be very good at adapting to changing circumstances and to coming up with innovative solutions. Now we've seen there are actually quite a few of these people in the military but they tend to be at the lower levels of the officer corps. So why are there not as many higher up? Well a lot of it has to do with the fact that people at the higher ranks are more in the sensing judging category or they tend to prefer people who think like they do. And so I think we need to spend a lot of time, there is already a good amount of effort being spent on this in trying to bring up and cultivate more of those intuitive thinking types. And this in fact lies at the heart of one of the most important struggles within the military today over the future of the officer corps. And you see I think General Petraeus, General Casey, Secretary of Gates very much understand this and you've probably seen them talking a lot about the importance of adaptive leadership. You know General Petraeus came back, oversaw the Brigadier General Promotion Board because he felt that they were not giving a fair shake to the more intuitive thinking types. You'd think that with those kind of heavy weights behind you that they would get things fixed but there is still I think a large constituency in the military that is averse to making these changes. And you know if you go into Iraq or Afghanistan, you notice there's a lot of people who are not out there in villages doing counterinsurgency, they're back doing things that can be standardized. So a lot of them have not bought into this idea yet. So I think we're going to see an ongoing battle here between the Army officers in the new mold and those in the old and I'm hoping this book will to some extent be used as fire support in this battle. Thank you very much. Okay, can you all hear me in the cheap seats? Great. My name is Tom Ricks, I'm going to provide a few comments and I'm going to ask Mark to interrupt me as we go along. First it is a real pleasure to be back at CSIS where I did indeed write Fiasco about five floors above here back in 2005. A lot of people back then just say, you're going to call that book what? And I found out after about six months nobody said that and about a year later a guy said to me, Fiasco, well duh, you know, where were you when I needed you? I want to begin by just saluting several friends and I see in the audience from Johns Hopkins, from here, from Iraq and Afghanistan. I also want to ask a question, would you put up your hand if you are a vet of Iraq or Afghanistan? Would you also put up your hand, keep those hands up please. Put up your hand if you are a vet of Vietnam or El Salvador. I just want to say thank you all very much for your service. And finally put up your hand if you've been a troop advisor anywhere. A cop, what about Oregon province back there Kyle? Okay, good. I just want to keep the interns honest here. Okay, I agree with about 90% of what Mark said but being a cranky sort I'm going to focus on the 10% with which I don't agree, which is why you should feel free to interrupt as we go along. Absolutely, leadership is necessary in counterinsurgency as it is in all forms of military operations and I agree leadership is even more necessary, good charismatic leadership is even more necessary in counterinsurgency. I saw this in Iraq. I think the great achievement of General Petraeus in Iraq was not counterinsurgency theory, basically that was hashed over stuff from the French and the British. What Petraeus' achievement was, was pushing it down through many echelons of command through this sort of thing like battlefield circulation, through going out and talking. I ran into battalion of brigade commanders with whom Petraeus or Odierno or both had spent entire days sitting and talking, skipping the division, skipping the corps, down to battalion and brigade. I ran into platoon leaders who were quoting General Petraeus' letters to the troops. I ran one day at L. Z. Jefferson into a private reading David Galula, the French counterinsurgency theorist. This was a radical change. For the first time in the entire Iraq war, which we've been fighting for about four years, everybody was on the same sheet of music. There was a common purpose, a common understanding of common goals, a radical change in the way the military operated there. And it came, I think, primarily from the energy and willpower of Petraeus. So yes, leadership counts. Another contrary example of this is in Afghanistan, where General McKinnon, I think, thought he was doing counterinsurgency. He was saying all the right words. He was issuing the right orders. They were talking about protecting the population. But Snuffy out in the field, or what they call Joe's today, wasn't buying it. And nobody was saying, Joe, you don't get a vote here. You're going to do it, counterinsurgency. What you found in the field was enemy-centric operations, a real gap between what Bagram thought and what Helman did. And that's an example of leadership not working. Leadership is necessary. Charismatic leadership is great. But I would say it is hardly sufficient. I have seen charismatic leadership without strategy. It is disastrous. You do not want to go there. Charismatic leadership without strategy or theory leads troops off a cliff. You have to have a strategy. Charismatic leadership without a strategy is a ferrari without a steering wheel. And that's what we had driving around a lot of places in Iraq for the first four years of the war. A ferrari without a steering wheel winds up in one place in the ditch. Can I interject here? Absolutely. There are, I need to get into something in the front. Oh, we good now? Okay. At the beginning of the book, I lay out what I think are 10 important attributes to counterinsurgency leaders. And one of them is charisma. But I think there are a lot of others and you don't have to have all those. And one of the other points I do make in the book is that you can be a very good conventional leader and be poor at counterinsurgency. And I think some of the individuals you're referring to would probably fit that mold. They may be charismatic. You know, someone like George S. Patton, very charismatic, effective in conventional warfare, would he have been good in counterinsurgency? I'm not so sure. And I do think you do have to have some sort of basic strategy but without having the battalion commanders there who can do it, you're not going to be able to turn that strategy into success. And I know in some of the stuff you've covered, even when Patreus was there, battalion commanders were, in many cases, come up with their own way to try to bring over elites from the other side. And Patreus himself very much emphasized the decentralized model. Mark, you ignorant slut. That dates me. That takes you back a Saturday in a lie 30 years ago. When local officials in Afghanistan were abusive or corrupt, that was a failure of both doctrine and leadership. One of the problems that American officials have to face is your host government, if it is abusive, if it is corrupt, you need to act against that because that's your goal is to get people to support that host government, not necessarily to get them to support you. You really don't care at the end of the day whether they support you as long as they will give some form of grudging allegiance or at least tolerance to the host government. I was really struck. I was reading an interview with some Afghan villagers who were explaining why they preferred the Taliban to the Afghan police. They said, look, we don't like the Taliban coming in saying we all have to grow beards and that women can't come into the marketplace. But at least they're not like the police who came in and took our little boys and raped them. That is a problem. That's something you need to deal with. That's one reason, actually, I think that General McChistel's plan is an intelligent one that says you need to get troops out there with the Afghan police in order to police their behavior. We have two enemies in Afghanistan. One is the Taliban and its allies. The other is the Afghan government. And the only way to deal with both of them is to put in additional troops and have them co-located with Afghan forces. We need to remember, as we discuss all this, also the counterinsurgency, while we're talking about the finer points of how many counterinsurgents can dance on the head of a pin, I think counterinsurgency is still a minority view inside the U.S. military. Petraeus may be a hero of the American people. I think he's an outlier to the general office at the core of the U.S. Army. They don't like Petraeus. Now, they're too polite to say so publicly. But Petraeus has three strikes against him. He likes reporters and journalists, reporters and politicians, and Washington. He had a successful first tour in Iraq, and he is a Ph.D. from Princeton. In the U.S. Army, that's three strikes. Now, they've tolerated him, but they kind of pushed him out in the joint world. Stay out there. Don't come back to the Army and pollute our young troops. So I think there's a real problem here in just getting people to take on. Counterinsurgency theory. This is one of the jobs of leadership, is to go out and actually make sure the battalion commanders are with the program, that they're not just giving you lip service and then going and hitting the local shake over the head because it vents some frustration. On leadership, I totally endorse Mark's view of relief of ineffective or weak leaders. This is a lost tool in the U.S. military. It's a great management tool. I believe it should be used more often. In my short unhappy life as a newsroom manager, I only fired one person, and I'll tell you both, he and I were happier the next day. He's now a successful screenwriter in Hollywood. He was not a good reporter. He was probably the smartest person I've ever had work for me, but he'd go up to Capitol Hill to cover hearings and read Charles Dickens' novels and miss large chunks of essential testimony to the Wall Street Journal of what happened at the banking committee yesterday. You don't do anybody any favors by leaving them in a position for which they are not fit. This isn't just people who don't get it. It's simply people who are at odds with you. But the corollary to that is relief cannot be a career terminator. It simply has to be, you're not the right person for this job right now. You are a useful, good, honest, loyal, dutiful officer and we'll find another position for you. That's essentially what made General Officer Management work in World War II. In World War II, you were either successful, dead or relieved within 90 days. Sometimes less than that. But relief did not end your career. Hanging San Williams, one of the great nicknames ever in the U.S. military, was an assistant division commander in France in 1944, was relieved as ADC and demoted to colonel. Stayed in the Army and retired 15 years later as a three-star general. Even more famous case, General Terry de La Mesa Allen, commander of the 1st Infantry Division in Sicily, 1943, the first time that American troops fought German troops on European soil. He won that first crucial battle and for his pains was relieved. A year later, he was commanding another division, 104th, across northern France and into Germany and had a happy and very successful leadership of that division. Relief also, and this is, I think, even more important to back up Mark and this, encourages risk-taking. All war requires risk-taking. But I think in a one-year rotation system, and we've seen variants of this now in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, in a one-year rotation system creates a powerful disincentive for risk-taking. What you get is a lot of commanders who think, keep my head down, go home, and we'll be okay. Why take any risk? The incentive is towards inaction. The threat of relief, I think, balances that incentive system and creates more of an incentive to get out there and to take the kind of initiative in risk-taking that, as Mark said, are essential, especially in counterinsurgency. Next, what works? Yes, absolutely. The mega-projects are not the way to go. What I think of as the Stalinist five-year projects, we're going to build a cement plant, we're going to restore electricity. While Americans fiddled about restoring electricity, I saw half a Baghdad string up little generators. And when Donald Rumsfeld flew over Baghdad and said, see the lights are on, it was not because of anything he did, it was because of all those little Sony generators that were across Baghdad, strung together in neighborhoods. Look at what the locals do. The locals frequently know where the solutions are. They just need some help. Micro-projects are definitely the way to go. Quick projects that are sustainable and can be seen and controlled by locals. I remember whether it was Chris Holshek who pointed this out to me in the fields in Iraq and said, don't hand out soccer balls, give them to the shake to hand out, empower the local. Don't make them like you, you're going to be gone. The shake needs help. Give him the soccer ball. Killer capture, yeah, you've got to killer capture a few, but I think fewer than we think. You will not find stronger advocates of a counter-insurgency approach that tried to killer capture their way out of Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is one reason I think that General McChrystal is such a powerful advocate of counter-insurgency. He's tried Plan A, and he knows it didn't work. Okay, well, yeah, I would, I do agree with that. My point, as I mentioned, there is the enemy-centric view which really focuses on the enemy, and I think they're partially correct in that there are some who would go overboard and say we don't really need to focus on the enemy at all. In fact, there's some language in the counter-insurgency manual that says that, but you do have to do some of that. I think, you know, General Petraeus would certainly tell you, I mean, a lot of his guidance does say you have to be relentless in pursuing the enemy, but that can't be all you do, because then you do get into the problems you talk about. So you do also have to work on local governance and bring the population in. Don't forget also the most relentless way in which General Petraeus pursued the enemy was running after them with wads of dollar bills, not with a weapon in his hand. The key fact in ending the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, or at least achieving a ceasefire to be more precise, was General Petraeus agreed to pay $30 million a month to put 100,000 Sunni insurgents on the payroll. They were not disarmed. They were not demobilized. They remained with their weapons in their units controlling areas. So it was a very generous ceasefire. Not a bad deal. $30 million, that's what George Steinbender pays for a mediocre second baseman. $30 million bought at least a long-term ceasefire. Now, how long at last we don't know. There's a lot of smart people who think Iraq is still going to have a pretty good Civil War down the road. Finally, something Mark's book also speaks to that I think is quite crucial is the problem of counterinsurgency in these countries. And yes, this is a big, big hole in the current American counterinsurgency doctrine that the manual 3-24 does not speak to at all. This is a problem in American counterinsurgency theory. We borrowed lock, stock, and barrel, French and British theory. French and British theory comes from their colonial experiences. Why is that important? Because they were fighting to stay in those colonies. Americans are fighting to leave the places we're in. So we have a very different outcome in mind. So the host government is not something we own, to which we can appoint Sir Gerald or the London police chief. It's something we're trying to set up so we can get out of there. It's a whole different set of problems, especially, and this is something I'm just trying to think my way through now, when the host government's interests diverge from us. Exhibit A, Jim, in South Vietnam. Exhibit B, Maliki, in Iraq. Exhibit C, Karzai, in Afghanistan. I think there comes a point in every counterinsurgency in which you, at all, are successful that the host government must divorce you, must try to stand on its own two feet, must effectively become anti-American in some form. That takes care of my comments, and I really appreciate the opportunity to comment. I think this is a really thoughtful, insightful book that all of you need to go by back there at the end of this thing. I'd like to open it up. We have time for just a couple of questions for Mark and for Tom, and as Tom pointed out, please do visit the back table. We have copies of this fantastic book, and as many of you can tell, Tom is a legendary Red Sox fan. Right here. Thank you. Masoud Aziz from Afghanistan. Thank you for the presentation. Very interesting. I think that, obviously, you're pointing out the leadership as being an important aspect of, I think, of command and control structure that the army is. To me, that would be an obvious factor. That's an important thing, but you're also saying it's important in counterinsurgency. I'm not sure if, by doing that, you're leaving aside a number of other extremely important aspects of counterinsurgency that needs to be developed. That is, counterinsurgency in terms of its relationship to governance, in terms of its relationship to actually development, but also developing aspects of understanding, being adaptive to the local environment, understanding culture, history, habits, and in case of Afghanistan, the extreme complex dynamics of tribes. So I think that, by only making that focus, perhaps some of these things are left on the table, you also mentioned aid as not being that helpful, and so therefore we have to focus on leadership. I'm not sure if that's why we should do that. Aid wasn't effective, like I think Tom mentioned in Afghanistan because of the delivery process of aid from the international community in Afghanistan. 90 cents on a dollar made it to the ground. That's why it wasn't effective. So small projects, I think, was important. And my question relates to something else that you brought up, and that is that certain leadership is important in the command and control process of the U.S. military involvement, for example, in Afghanistan, but you also mentioned that leadership is also important and it is something that ought to be done by the counter-insurgent factors, the U.S. NATO command, in terms of affecting local host government structures of leadership. I think that Tom mentioned some issues about police and training of the Afghan army. I would certainly agree with that, but you want to be careful how far you want to take that. You certainly don't want to be perceived as affecting directly government in terms of its leadership because that's something that could be used against you very easily. That's the case in Pakistan. That's against the U.S. That's the issue raised in Afghanistan. It's not that issue yet. So you have to, that's my question, if you want to elaborate that. All right. Well, yeah, you raised a couple of important issues. Let me just hit on those quickly. I mean, maybe you did not cover these in enough detail, but in terms of governance as well as security and all these other things, leadership is important in all of those. Corruption is almost entirely a problem of bad leadership, especially in Afghanistan because the Afghans will tell you that if somebody is taking a bribe, their boss is probably involved in it too. And so if you don't have a police chief who has some integrity, there's going to be corruption. If the mayor doesn't have their proper care for age six, there's going to be corruption. In terms of you mentioned also dealing with the tribes, good leaders are going to have that intuition and that complex problem-solving skill that will help them deal with it. Now, in terms of the question about influencing, the United States influencing who Afghanistan's leaders are, there's actually a lot of this going on already. And if you talk to Americans who've worked over there with the police, for example, which has horrific leadership problems, there have been some just terrible Afghan police chiefs who were corrupted, didn't know what they were doing, and we've gone to the Afghans and said, this guy really needs to go. And now we haven't always twisted their arm. And fortunately, one of the really good things that's happened lately in Afghanistan is they've got a new interior minister who came in last year, Atmar, who's been very cooperative with us. And so in most cases, actually, when he's involved, we'll go to him and say, so-and-so is corrupt. So-and-so is allowing his troops to rape young boys. He will get them out of there. Now, there's still exceptions. If somebody's a relative of Karzai, then things become problematic. There is, again, we like to think that we're going to defer to the host nation's judgment. But, you know, sometimes we've got to have a role, and the same thing goes to with Iraq early on. We said, well, we're going to let the Afghans do it. You know, everyone says, T.E. Lawrence, that you've got to let the natives' population do it themselves. Well, sometimes that just doesn't work, and sometimes the Americans have to get more involved. Question over here. Hi, Tom. Okay, I've got two comments. Colonel Chris Holshek, I'm a civil affairs guy. And I've got kind of a comment for Tom and then a question for Mark. I've got to pick up on where you left off on your final point, because I think in my experience as a practitioner in this kind of business to include low-level counterinsurgency operations I just did in Liberia. I just want to point out that Chris Holshek was one of the great heroes of civil affairs in Iraq in 1904 when he tried to keep Bakuba from blowing up. Thanks. I think there's way too much emphasis on hearts and minds. As I like to tell people, I don't care if you like me, because I'm going home to ride my Harley-Davidson. Okay? So my mission here is to make you like yourself. And because we're gone at some time. You know, it's that T.E. Lawrence, you know, our time is short, and it's not our country. So the emphasis should be, I like to call on not just capacity, but on confidence, on their part. And that's been my approach to it. So I certainly, under school, we, in our doctrine and our approaches, it's way too much about hearts and minds. And I think we just lose a lot of resources that way. That's just a comment. Mark, I found your presentation fascinating, but I've also read John Nagel's book and have talked with John at length. He learned to eat soup with a knife. And he, of course, his premise is that successful counterinsurgency is predicated on which is the better learning organization. And I wondered if you could comment on your very patient insight about the role of leadership and then this idea of learning organizations and how those two connect. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think there are aspects of the learning organization model that are very important. And one of the points I make in the book is it was a big mistake to throw counterinsurgency out the window as the Army basically did after Vietnam. Now, the Marine Corps did continue to do some instruction. It's always been part of their mission. So I think you want that to be an important part. But there is, I think you do, there is a danger. And there's an interview with General Mattis I did, which is quoted in the book to talk about this. If you focus too much on being a learning organization, you tend to get too drawn into your doctrine and you try too much to rely on the past. And that, again, gets back to this issue because certain personalities like to use the past more than to think innovatively about the president. Mattis' point was he thinks we, the U.S. military has to some extent become over-reliant on its doctrine. I think certainly the Army has a greater tendency in that regard. But as I said too, every situation is different. I do think, again, you can't use a model and apply it everywhere, but I have found that most of the good practitioners, the very good ones, have studied a lot of history, so they have a lot of familiarity with the subject, which, you know, Klossowitz talks about this in his book about how you want to have a lot of familiarity. You're not going to know the answers, but if you've spent a lot of time studying it and thinking about it and capturing lessons learned, when you get to that situation, you'll have a toolbox that will help you address those problems. That's what I add. I've always thought you could summarize this discussion in one line. The Army has a doctrine, the Marine Corps has a culture. We've got time for one more. Go right in the back. Mark Viola, I was wondering, could you comment on intelligence, the value of intelligence, the expanding role of intelligence? And I'm not talking about targeting. I'm talking about strategic use of intelligence, especially as it related to the population and the culture and so forth. Most of what I cover in the book is in terms of intelligence, is the human intelligence, and I think really the most important intelligence in counterinsurgency is at that human level, at that local level, and getting the villagers to tell you where the insurgents are, who they are, which again comes back to leadership. My first book on the Phoenix program in Vietnam had a great deal about that. That's part of how I got into this, was I was talking to all these intelligence officers who worked in Vietnam, and they said, which areas were you getting more intelligence? Where did you have the cooperation supporting you or helping you more? And it always came back to a question, of who was the South Vietnamese district chief or police chief or what have you? So I think it's critical there. I mean, in terms of the largest strategic intelligence, are you talking about in terms of understanding culture or in a country? I think we're doing what needs to be done. And I think, as I mentioned, battlefield circulation of commanders is a big part of this because if you have someone like General McChrystal who's going out and talking to the people in the field, he tends to learn more that way than if he sits back in his headquarters like General Sanchez did, for example, in Iraq. I mean, certainly there's a lot of other intel stuff out there that we don't know about, but I think if you're looking at the intelligence that's going to be used to make decisions on whether to commit more troops, I think we've probably got a pretty good handle of it at the higher levels because of the fact that we've got commanders there who are, spent the time to go out and hear from the horse's mouth what's going on in these districts. So that's about it. Any comments on that? I want to give great thanks to Mark Moyer and Tom Ricks for this terrific discussion. Again, we do have books in the back and thanks again for your remarks and thanks to all of you for coming today. Appreciate it.