Guest Fred Kaplan talks about the history of counterinsurgency and his new book, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, as well as how we managed to get out of Iraq, how Afghanistan's failure may have been preordained, how PowerPoint makes people dumb, and how he made a career out of war writing.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 4 - God's Way of Teaching Americans Geography
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you're listening to a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. Our guest this episode is Fred Kaplan, who recently published a book called The Insurgents, David Petraeus, and The Plot to Change the American Way of War. The Insurgents, according to the book flap, is the inside story of the small group of soldier scholars led by General David Petraeus, who plotted to revolutionize one of the largest oldest and most hide-bound institutions, the United States military. Their aim was to build a new army that could fight the new kind of war in the post-Cold War age, not massive wars on vast battlefields, but small wars in cities and villages against insurgents and terrorists. It used to be wars not only of fighting, but of nation-building, often not of necessity, but of choice. And now, Fred Kaplan. My guest on The Virtual Memories Show today is Fred Kaplan, author of The Insurgents, David Petraeus, and The Plot to Change the American Way of War, which was recently released by Simon and Schuster. Fred, welcome to the show. Thanks. I'm sure you've been asked this a lot, but can you tell us about the history of counter-insurgency and why the US military avoided it for so long, which is to ask, where did this book come from? The US Army has traditionally defined war as a clash of firepower, and victory goes to the side that amasses the most firepower. And so they've defined war as major combat operations between foes of comparable strength, and operations such as, you know, against insurgents or terrorists, that sort of thing. They actually, in the '90s, they called this military operations other than war. It wasn't even war. So in capital letters, M-O-O-T-W, or Mootois, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the '90s was once overheard saying, "Real men don't do Mootois." But you know, at the same time, the junior officers rising through the ranks, the main characters in my book, Petraeus and others, coming up in the '80s and early '90s, you know, where were they being deployed? They were in El Salvador, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, you know, these places, they sure felt like war to these guys, but, and they also thought that these were the kinds of conflicts that we were going to be facing in the coming decades, and they looked and saw that their own generals had no idea about this. They weren't even considering it war. They didn't recognize that it had a completely different character, a different face, requiring different training, different deployment patterns, promoting certain kinds of officers that are different. And so they determined that as they rose higher through the ranks, they would mount a revolution within the army to make it more adaptable to the post-Cold War world. Well, how much of a plot, I guess, how much of a revolution do you think it was? In the book, you chronicle the rise of the counter-insurgency group, ironically, called the insurgents within the U.S. military. But there's also instances of a sort of spontaneous application of these tactics in Iraq and in Afghanistan, separate from Petraeus and his core group of insurgents. Well, I guess the question is, how inevitable do you think counter-insurgency was? Well, it wasn't inevitable at all. As for the plot, I mean, yeah, the subtitle is the plot, David Petraeus and the plot to change the American way war. These guys considered it a plot. They referred to themselves as the cabal, or the West Point Mafia, because a lot of them came out of the Social Science Department at West Point. One of the plotters did a PowerPoint presentation in late 2006, which was titled An Insurgent in the Coin Revolution, you know, it was the title. So that's how they viewed themselves. As for the inevitability, it is true there were these quite apart from Petraeus. There were a few people doing this sort of thing, but it's not as random as it seems. For example, the guy who did it most successfully early on was H.R. McMaster, Colonel H.R. McMaster. Commander of the Third Armored Calvity Regiment did a very successful counter-insurgency operation in Talafar. But who was H.R. McMaster? Well, he came out of the History Department at West Point, which was an offshoot of the Social Science Department. In other words, he'd actually read military history. He'd done a Ph.D. dissertation on the Vietnam War, which immersed him more deeply in this. And one of the things that he did when he first got to Iraq before he was in Talafar was he read the 1962 proceedings of a Rand Corporation conference on counter-insurgency, which featured a lot of the people whose books these guys ended up reading. So while he was at that point, not one of Petraeus' inner circle, although he would soon become one, it wasn't so random. Most of the people who were doing these kinds of things independently came out of the same tradition that Petraeus did. They might not have known each other at the first, but they came out of the same school. And again, searching through the same books like the little other-- The same book, another one, Colonel Sean McFarland, who instigated the Anbar Awakening in Anbar. He was a commander of an army brigade that made the first gestures. He didn't even know-- Patrice was writing a counter-insurgency manual for the entire army when he did this. And Petraeus and nobody knew what he was doing in Anbar, but McFarland had come out of the Social Science Department at West Point. He'd read all these books. He had been McMaster's replacement in Tal Afar, and McMaster showed him all the things that he'd been doing. So it's more interrelated. It's more linked than it might appear at a good second glance. First glance, people think, "Oh, it's all Petraeus." You go deeper, you say, "Well, no, there were all these other people and all these other things going on independently." But then you look more closely into that, and you see, "Oh, well, it really is all linked after all." Yeah, so the most interesting in the book was that intellectual history, the way, again, it all ties and begins with a few writers in '50s, England, and-- Right. Well, the Social Science Department at West Point, that in itself is an interesting place. It was started right after World War II by a brigadier general named George Abe Lincoln, and he had been--he taught at West Point, he went into the army like everybody else when the war started. He rose very quickly through the planning staff and became General Marshall's right-hand man in a lot of the post-war settlements. And he looked around and he realized that, "Okay, America is taking on global responsibilities, and yet my alma mater, my army, we're good at training battalion commanders and mess officers." But now we need to train people with a global vision, with an understanding of how the world works. So he went--he actually took a demotion to Colonel so that he could go back to West Point and start this Social Science Department, which would educate a handful, they elite, in economics, international relations, that sort of thing. And then he said, "Okay, we're going to take the best students in this department. I'm going to send them off to graduate school at a government expense. I get their PhDs. They come back to teach at West Point for three years." And then he had all these connections all over the army and in Washington, "Then I'll get them a good job at some command post." And what arose over the decades was this community of Sosh, they called themselves, Social Science. Sosh, guys, they called themselves the Lincoln Brigade in kind of a play on the, you know, the lefty, American lefties who went to Spain to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. And most of the policy generals that you've ever heard of coming through the '70s and '80s and so forth, almost all of them came, they were members of the Lincoln Brigade. And how difficult was it to justify this notion of officers being involved in policy? I know that comes up multiple times in the book, that question of how involved the military should be in setting policy as opposed to executing. How difficult was that to reconcile for someone like Lincoln and the Sosh Brigade? Well, the initial idea was that they would be staff officers. But you know, especially during the Bush administration and the catastrophe that arose in Iraq and the absence of any policy at all, these generals kind of took on a policy dimension, which was kind of the original sin, that was kind of where the troubles began, when people started viewing someone like Petraeus, not just as a military commander, but as some kind of miracle worker and seer. And looking at counterinsurgency, not as a strategy or an approach to warfare that works in certain circumstances, just like tank warfare works in certain circumstances. But as the guy who had the answer for how to solve these wars that we got involved in, and that's actually when things take a tragic turn in my story. And as much as you show how Petraeus's principles do not work in Afghanistan, the way they seem to work in Iraq, well, in your opinion, do you think COIN itself worked in Iraq or were certain aspects of COIN as well as, again, certain existing trends within post-war Iraq? How responsible, I guess, would you say it was Petraeus? Well, we should back up a little bit and talk about what is COIN. The idea of COIN is that it recognizes that insurgencies grow out of social conditions. They usually emerge in a place where the government is not satisfying certain needs or demands of the people. And so what the insurgency is doing is setting up a parallel government or mounting a coup to install themselves in power either generally or opportunistically using slogans, certain things, you know, playing on inadequacies of the government. So from that insight, the counterinsurgency theorists who wrote in, you know, some of them even as long as a hundred years ago, but most of them in colonial post-war times, they saw, okay, look, Mao Zedong said this initially, these kinds of wars are only 20% military. They're 80% political. And these kinds of wars, sometimes mimeograph machines can be as important as machine guns. Cement can be as important as mortar shells. The goal is not so much to kill the enemy is to protect the population. You know, it's an asymmetric war. You have a fl- you have a cow, flatting of swatting away flies. You can keep swatting away at the flies, but more flies are going to come. What you have to do is drain the swamp that bread the flies. So this was the kind of thing that most traditional army, American army generals detested this idea of nation building and getting involved in do-gooder work, this kind of thing. They hated this. So there was an enormous challenge to this when Petraeus started it, and it's one reason why it has never really picked up enormous steam within the U.S. army until really very recently. Well, it was interesting doing research for this. I harken back to one of those moments that I seem to be the only person to recall, which was the 2000 presidential debates between Gore and Bush where- I can quote you actually, I printed it out here, Bush, they're both being asked about military operations in the coming decade. And they ask about Somalia, Bush says Somalia started off as a humanitarian mission, then changed into a nation building mission, and that's where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow a dictator when it's in our best interests. But in this case, it was a nation building exercise, same with Haiti. I wouldn't have supported either. And later in the debate, he makes an exception for activity in the Persian Gulf, citing a conflict of interest, if you know what I mean, as he put it, which I guess we all should have paid a little more attention to. You know, you look back at Bush's words. There's something there. He changed, he changed completely, and if you look Condi Rice, his big national security advisor, she wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine right before the election saying, we need to get back to big power politics. All this nation building stuff is nonsense. But in a sense, they held up their side of the bargain with Iraq and Afghanistan. They simply believed that the military was there to win the war. And as you pointed out, as other researchers have done, they had no post-war planning. That's true. That's a problem. I mean, what happened in the early part of the Bush administration is that Rumsfeld in particular became enraptured of this notion of a revolution in military affairs. This was an idea that had been kicking around for about a decade. And the idea was that with these new smart bombs and network-centric communication systems, you don't need large armies anymore. You can do all this stuff with a small number of smart bombs leveled at a certain number of targets, and that'll overthrow the government. That'll topple the army. And he was right on that. But then what happened in Iraq, we go in there, we blow the cap off of the government, but then the whole society falls apart. And we find ourselves in a horrible situation where there isn't a resistance. We move into an occupation, and then all hell breaks loose because we have no idea what we're doing. It wasn't just Bush, it wasn't just Rumsfeld who had no plan for what to do after Saddam fell. The army had no plan for what to do after Saddam fell. And so they kept doing -- that was left up to individual commanders on the ground, and most of them did what they were trained to do, which was to bash down doors and to arrest and kill people who looked suspicious, which of course only inflamed the insurgency. Because you know, you killed the wrong guy, all of his brothers and cousins, not just distrust you, but they joined the insurgency. So it was just a horrible situation, and part of it grew out of the fact that for the previous decade and a half, when these junior officers were getting interested in counter-insurgency strategies, the top brass still remained completely, not just uninterested in, but hostile to the notion. With the notion of not ending up back in Vietnam. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Now, why do you think Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs and everyone higher up really didn't take the post-war scenario into account. Is it simply they believed the candy and flowers that everyone would just be happy that Saddam was gone? There is a tendency for people to believe that everybody around the world is pretty much like us. And to the extent they aren't, it's only because some dictator is stopping their boot on their heads. That boot is lifted, though they'll kind of become like us. It's a very one-dimensional view of conflict. I remember there is a story, and I wrote about this too, that right before the invasion of Iraq Bush had a few Iraqi exiles in his office, and they were talking about things, and one of them said, "You know, Mr. President, after Saddam is overthrown, the thing you really have to watch out for is the possible resurgence of tensions between Sunni and Shia." This was a problem many years ago, and it's likely to revive in the absence of a central dictator. And Bush looked at them like they were speaking Martian or something. I mean, he had not been told that there were two or three or maybe even more kinds of Iraqis, this didn't even occur to him. And there were people in the State Department who knew, but Rumsfeld rested away control of the post-war phase of Iraq, because he didn't want for there to be a post-war phase of Iraq. And that's what gets to me. What was the— Well, the idea is, look, this is kind of an experiment in this revolution of military affairs, and it doesn't—it works only if you kind of get in and out very quickly. The idea is you go in with a handful of troops, you know, you can show the world that you can slaughter this guy with one hand tied behind your back. If then you end up getting stuck there for 10 years with 150,000, 200,000 troops, that doesn't send the right message. And similarly, within the book, one of the key, I would say villains, I guess, is Jerry Bremer, the first pro-consul— Well, Bremer, really. I mean, here's one thing. They did think a little bit about the post-war. There was an NSC meeting—there were two NSC meetings, a few weeks before the invasion, where it was—they were talking about, okay, what happens to the Iraq Army? What happens to the Bath Party? And they decided, unanimously, with President Bush present, that, okay, we're going to get rid of the Republican guard, they have to go, but the rest of the officer corps will bet. We'll have like a kind of a truth and reconciliation committee, like in South Africa or a certain parts of Eastern Europe. And we anticipate that maybe 5% of the officer corps will have to leave, and then we restore the Army. Same thing with the Bath Party, exactly the same thing. So Bremer gets there, he issues two directives, one, get rid of the Army, two, ban all Bath Party members from government position. It is still not known, after all this time, where these directives came from. I saw him speak at a pharmaceutical conference at my day job, for some reason they invited him to the Partnerships and Clinical Trials, about five or six years ago. I had to attend once again. It was a very bad clinical trial in Iraq. Well, then that actually gets to my point in your book that I'll get to soon. He contended they were beaten, they were already going home, and they were loaded with weapons. Therefore, we had to disband the Army, and it just was so syllogistic. Yeah, but it's just not true, in fact, you know, remember we were dropping leaflets on the Army headquarters saying, don't fight, don't fight, we'll come get you afterwards. And there were, there were, there were Army, U.S. Army officers there who were organizing the Army troops to come back into. So I think it all came out of Cheney's office through Ahmed Chalabi, but I don't have any proof of this, my indirect, except that they both had an interest in this. My indirect proof is that we still don't know where it came from, and the office of the Vice President has remained the most tight-lipped entity from that era. So it's like the Sherlock Holmes dog that didn't bark. Right, the silent speaks volumes. Keeping in tune with the clinical trials aspect, one of the things that's going on within the pharmaceutical trials world is the regulatory agencies are no longer interested in the number that you're reducing people's cholesterol, they're now interested in the outcomes. They want to see five years from now are you actually creating fewer cardiovascular events. Those old markers no longer mean what they used to. And that thread comes up within your book in terms of no longer looking for the immediate effects, but trying to see what the outcomes of these various strategies are. Can you talk about sort of how that has changed in terms of understanding the military and understanding our operations? Well, initially, Petraeus and these guys, they were very focused on outcomes. They said, okay, look, when the surge began and the switch to the counterinsurgency strategy, which we can talk about a little bit later, they knew right away that, okay, initially American casualties are probably going to go up because one thing that he did, he had more troops at his disposal, and instead of, you know, having them patrol in the daytime and then go back to the major bases on the outskirts of town surrounded by tall fences at night, they stayed there. They stayed in the neighborhoods in these combat outposts. So they would be facing, it would be exposed to the enemy more incessantly. And so initially there would be higher casualties. But the theory was that after a while that sectarian violence would be brought down casually as we brought down. And in fact, that is what happened. When he got to Afghanistan, you know, Petraeus, he, you know, was seen as the savior of Iraq, the miracle man. So let's send him to Afghanistan and maybe he can work the same miracles. He didn't for a variety of reasons, which we can get into. But one thing he started doing was just, he had kind of a deadline of a year to make significant progress. So he just started throwing everything into the works, you know, stepping up military operations against the Taliban, increasing air strikes, increasing raids, trying to do counterinsurgency at, well, just getting these effects, you know, well, how many Taliban did we kill this month? How many strikes did we do? How many raids, hoping that at some point the effects would, there'd be a tipping point and you'd start seeing outcomes. And a friend of his, in fact, put it exactly in those terms, a friend of his, that old classmate came out to kind of look at what was going on. And he saw that there was at least a strategy in place in Afghanistan now, which there hadn't been for the previous eight years. But he didn't quite see how the, if he asked, Petraeus goes, "David, I see you're getting all these effects, but I don't see how they're adding up to an outcome. I don't see how you're getting to the strategic goal of, you know, of getting to a situation where the Taliban are so weak and al-Qaeda is pushed out so solidly that some kind of negotiation can be conducted with the Afghan government that preserves the constitutional order that's in place. That was the goal. You know, he had said many times where these kinds of wars don't end with signing on the USS Missouri. Surrender ceremony. Yeah. There was a negotiation, and the goal is to get it in a negotiation where our side kind of does it kind of help, is more dictating the terms than vice versa. Okay. Now, what do you think was the breaking point in Iraq that led to the decision to bring in Petraeus and to adopt more of a coin strategy? To bring in the surge, essentially, can you sort of characterize whether you were there? Well, you know, large organizations often change in the face of catastrophe, and you know, there was a catastrophe in Iraq. It was just spinning out of control, but, you know, you can imagine a history book, you know, summing this up on one page saying, "Okay, well, an insurgency was finally recognized, so President Bush adopted a counter-insurgency strike. It's not how it happened. Go back to my subtitle with a word plot in it. There was a plot. By this time, Petraeus was out at Fort Leavenworth. He was running the Combined Arms Center. He had just put together a counter-insurgency field manual that he had pushed through the army bureaucracy as to be something with the impromatur of the army, and there was a lot of resistance to this for reasons we discussed earlier. At the end of 2006, four things happened. One, Rumsfeld was fired, there were midterm elections, Republicans did badly, Rumsfeld was fired. Bob Gates was brought in, two, it's announced that Petraeus is being sent back to Iraq as the commander, three, Bush orders the surge, four, Bush announces there will be a new strategy essentially, counter-insurgency, not the old way. These things did not happen coincidentally. It was all of the peace. Petraeus, while he was out in Leavenworth, and General George Casey was the commander in Iraq, and he was resisting that the shift either to more forces or to counter-insurgency, so Petraeus is using his network. He has a far-flung network throughout the Pentagon bureaucracy consisting of old classmates, underlings who were under his command when he was a division commander or an assistant division commander, and at the same time, he really, in particular, reaches out to a woman named Megan O'Sullivan, who was Bush's senior advisor on Iraq in the National Security Council, and at one point, he kind of forms a back channel with her, and at one point, they're talking on the phone almost every day. Now, I really have to underline how really kind of outrageous this was. Here's Petraeus, a three-star general out in Fort Leavenworth, talking, conspiring with the president, senior advisor on Iraq, the advisor asking Petraeus, "Well, you know, General Casey says that we only need one more brigade. That would be enough. What do you think?" And Petraeus would be coming up with these rebuttal points, which she would then take into the National Security Advisor or the president personally. I mean, this would be going on, if this had been discovered, really, the three-star general kind of contravening the orders and policy preferences of the four-star general, who is the combatant commander. At the same time, there was a private study done at the American Enterprise Institute by a guy named Fred Kagan, who had been a history professor at West Point, which made the case for a surge in Iraq, you know, five new brigades. Well, he had done this study with the assistance of two recently retired Army officers who had been technical assistants to his old office made at West Point HR McMaster, who happened to be in Washington when this was going on, working on a kind of advisory panel of kernels to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was meeting with Kagan behind the scenes secretly, giving him some of this advice. Then, when the study was done, other people in Petraeus's network made sure that the study got into the hands of the vice president and got into the hands of the new secretary of defense, Bob Gates, who came on board with the idea that he had to do something about Iraq. So, these three or four things happen all at once, but it's not like some serendipitous coincidence. This was an operation with exquisite timing. And do you think, ultimately, that that accounts for success, this change in strategy accounts for the... I don't even want to say success in Iraq. The success in getting out of Iraq actively safely. Yeah. I think it did, because there were other things going on. We talked earlier, the Anbar Awakening had already begun, and part of that was because the Sunnis realized that they were losing the Civil War with the Shia, they needed help, our help. There were other things going on that preceded Petraeus, that preceded even his counterinsurgency manual, but Petraeus was one of the rare commanders who would have recognized what was going on and who would know what to do about it. Have Casey had still been commander? Or if somebody besides Sean McFarland had been out in Anbar province, it wouldn't have gone anywhere. And what happened, well, again, let's talk about Petraeus' motive operation again. In Anbar, he goes out, he sees what's going on in Anbar, and he says, "Wow, a counterinsurgency thing is happening here." So, Petraeus spreads it. How does he spread it? He heads up something called the Sons of Iraq, where he recruits Sunni militants to come join our side against the jihadists who had recently become their enemy. It had been their ally, but they'd gone too far, and they were wanting to strike back at the jihadists. He did this by paying them salaries out of his commander's discretionary fund. Now, commanders' discretionary fund, that had been set up to, you know, do things like pay some people for sweeping the streets or for joining a little neighborhood watch auxiliary force. He was using it to pay militants who had been shooting at us two weeks earlier. And as far as anybody might guess, might be shooting at us again two months since without telling anybody in Washington what he was doing. He even got some of his lawyers to rationalize it as, yes, it falls under the rubric site of security, so he was able to get away with it. At the same time, he needed to show that he was balanced, and he needed to go after the Shia militia led by Matata al-Sawder in Sawder City Baghdad. Maliki was very much, Prime Minister Maliki had prohibited General Casey from going into Sawder City, because he had his own alliance with Sawder. Petraeus just did it. He just went into Sawder City, and then came out with intelligence showing Sawder, sorry, that Sawder wasn't as big an ally as he thought, he was in cahoots with the Iranians. Anyway, he was doing all this really pretty amazing manipulation going on. And in the end, the combination of all this, it did lead to a tremendous decline in casualties, a tremendous reduction in sectarian violence. Now that's a tactical thing, as you said. Petraeus had said all along, "Look, the goal here is to give the factions in Iraq some breathing space, give them a zone of security so that they can get their act together and settle their disputes and form a cohesive government without having to worry about bombs falling every five minutes." So the problem was that, as we now know, Maliki really wasn't interested in getting the act together. He wasn't interested in working out an oil revenue sharing formula. He wasn't interested in incorporating very many sons of Iraq into the National Army. And so what we're seeing today, again, although at a much lower level than was the case, we're seeing the continuation of sectarian violence and an unstable government. Well, it's a question that I had that came up when you're enumerating the principles of coin early on in terms of trying to establish a legitimacy or help reform the existing government as a way of placating the people and bringing them on to the side of the government away from the insurgency. It seems that in some of the earlier cases, like the ones Gullula was writing about and Malaya for the Brits, that holds up. But given that both Iraq and Afghanistan, the original State of Ames were to completely demolish the government and to leave a system in place with people who had no tradition of an elected government, it just seems as though coin even won't, you know, fulfill those needs. Well, yeah. It might be out in general because, I mean, you mentioned Malaya. Malaya is often seen as kind of a model. But look at what Malaya, Malaya, it wasn't like the Brits had to deal with the, and negotiate with the Malayan authorities. They were the Malayan authorities. It was a British colony. They could do pretty much what they wanted there. So there wasn't any question of having to align our interests with the Malayan government's interests. They were one in the same. There was a woman who worked for General Karelle, who was the deputy commander in Iraq, named Celeste Ward, who read and, you know, it's all goes back to Vietnam and trying to refight the Vietnam War in the, quote, unquote, right way, she had come across a document that was written by a guy named Robert Comer, who was a big Vietnam advisor back in the mid-70s when the war was still going on. And he made two observations about the Vietnam War and why we were failing. One was that, you know, while we're fighting a guerrilla war with conventional tactics, and that was the one that people like Petraeus go armed on to, like we were fighting the wrong war. But Comer made another point, which was more profound, really. He said, look, what's really happening, the real downer here is that the Vietnamese government, South Vietnamese government and the South Vietnamese army just are not interested in reform. They're not interested in reforming themselves in a way that would win over the appeal of the South Vietnamese people. And so we have become prisoners of them, not the other way around. The staff member on Carelli named Celeste Ward looks at this and says, that's exactly what's going on in Iraq. And she draws up this briefing, which talks about divergent end states, Iraq and Iraq, and she says, okay, look, let's look at all the lines of operations, security, economics, politics, and so forth. And let's compare our desired end state with Maliki's, desired end state. They were completely different. We wanted a coherent government that would fight the war on terror. Maliki was just interested in a Shia-dominated government, and it just went on down the list. And she made the point, look, if we are helping to make the government and the military more competent, and their interests are not the same as ours, and in fact what they are interested in is to become more, then to become predators, then we're helping make them more effective predators, and we're not doing anything that's in our interests. Now a lot of people read that study, but the people who were around Patreus said, well, you know, she's right, but all this means is that we have to, we have to prod Maliki into changing his interests. Well, maybe, maybe not. It lasted for a little while, not for long. In Afghanistan, you have exactly the same problem, and it didn't work at all. It's not working. It's not. It's not. It's not a polar warlord in a fraction of country. Well, you know, look, I mean, the original sin there might have been to create a new government that was heavily centralized. You know, you have the situation where the president appoints all the district governors, the regional leaders, that sort of thing. But these places are way out in the middle of nowhere, that there's no real conveyor belt. There's, it's a very illiterate, even the people, even if you go down to like the deputy ministry levels, you have people who can't read or write. And so you, to create power to, to maintain your power at the top, you basically have to create a criminal network. And so one of the things, and you know, you have people like Patreus and Admiral Mullen when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testifying before Congress said, you know, at least as big a problem as the Taliban is the problem of corruption in the Afghan government. We're not going to be able to solve this unless we can solve that, but it's not just the problem of Karzai who has his own weirdness, but anybody in that position. Their interests and our interests are fundamentally different. And as long as that's the case, a counterinsurgency strategy, at least as Patreus and these guys to find it, is simply not going to work. What do you think could have worked in Afghanistan, or was it simply we should have gone in, uprooted as much as we could, and left? Well, it depends what you mean by work. Yeah. Outcomes again. Yeah, exactly. If, you know, there was, I mean, you recall that at the last half of 2009, there was a big intramural thing going on within the Obama national security team. What do we do in Afghanistan? The one guy in the room who opposed doing the counterinsurgency in a surge was Vice President Biden. And from the beginning, he was saying, look, I don't quite understand why we're wanting to do this nation building in Afghanistan when the problem is al Qaeda and Pakistan. So why don't we just, you know, use drones and commando raids to go after the al Qaeda on the border, especially on the borders, and the more militant ones elsewhere. Let's accelerate the training of the Afghan army so they can do this themselves. And that's really about it. We're at a loss. And, you know, the general sitting around the table would, you know, kind of say, well, yes, but you don't understand because, and then they would go to these glue arguments. You know, we have to drain the swamp. We can't just go after the insurgents. We have to, we have to, we have to ameliorate the horrendous things in the society that create an appeal that we have to drive the support for the insurgents by changing the conditions. And Biden would say, well, you know, this is going to take a long time. And the American people aren't going to have patience for it. And as you point out in the book, if there was a textbook example of a country that this is the exact wrong policy for its Afghanistan. Well, that's the other thing. This book by Galula that portrays and many others took off the shelf repeatedly. There was one chapter. It was called prerequisites for a successful insurgency. And it listed the conditions in a country which would make it most likely for an insurgency to win. And it included things like a corrupt central government, a largely rural illiterate population, a mountainous terrain on the borders, a bordering state that was used as a sanctuary by the insurgents. You add it up, it's a portrait of Afghanistan. In fact, Galula even has a little diagram in his book. He's drawn a map of what the ideal insurgency state would look like. And it's a dead ringer for Afghanistan. So, you know, this was sort of, it was written from the beginning that this kind of thing just was not going to work out, or it was extremely unlikely that it was going to work out. And yet, Petraeus took the dare? Well, you know, his view was, well, you have to do it. Otherwise, it's going to be futile. The other thing about Petraeus is that this was a guy who had spent his entire career overcoming the odds, you know, the story, it's famous, you know, once when he was an assistant division commander and leading a live fire exercise, one of his guys tripped, accidentally pulled the trigger and shot Petraeus in the chest. He recovered much more quickly than the doctors had forecast. One time when he was jumping out of a plane, the parachute ripped, he did a free fall for 60 feet, broke his pelvis, recovered, you know, ran faster than ever before. So, it reminded me of that one prince from War and Peace who just keeps getting shot up and disappearing in the back of it. And then Iraq, that was seen as a disaster, it wasn't going to work. You know, he brought it out from nowhere. So he thought that, well, the common view is, well, if there's one guy who can do this, it's Petraeus. But you know, there was one thing, and I think that this was really irresponsible of him. In the last of these 10 meetings that Obama had at the end of 2009, what to do, he just brought it, just, it was a much smaller meeting. It was just the General's Secretary of Defense, a couple of other people, and it was two days before he was going to West Point to announce his new policy. And he said, "Okay, here's what I'm going to do. You know, you guys are asking for 40,000 more troops. I'm going to give you 33,000, and NATO will provide another 7,000. We're going to do counterinsurgency in the south, in the cities in the south. But in 18 months, I'm going to start to withdraw the surge troops. So can you tell me that within this 18-month period, you can turn things around to the point where the Afghan army can take the lead in the fight, in a majority of the districts. Because tell me, because if they can't, if you think they can't, then I'll just, you know, give you another 10,000 troops who will accelerate the training of the army. And that's it. And by the way, don't think that you can come back here in 18 months, having done some of this, and think that I'm going to give you more troops or more, you know, I'm not. This is all you're going to get. So can you do it? Can you do it? And all of them around the room said, "Yes, sir, yes, sir." And Petraeus, including Petraeus, and Petraeus knew that it was going to take longer than this. And people, friends of his, asked him, "Why did you say yes to this?" And he had two questions, two answers. One, his first was, you know, "Well, look, you know, I think that we'll make enough improvements that he'll have to go in deeper." Second, he said, "Well, you know, this wasn't that kind of a meeting. He wasn't really looking for advice. He was looking for us to sign up." But you know, there are a lot of meetings like that. And I think that one lesson of Vietnam, among other things, is that if you're called in to give military advice, even if it's kind of a charade, it's your responsibility to give your best military advice. I think it was his responsibility to say, "Sir, this just isn't going to happen in 18 months. I cannot guarantee. I cannot even say it's probable." And it's not like his career would have been derailed at that point. Well, it might have been, actually. Yeah. He was fourth star by then. Oh, yeah. He was fourth star. But he might have been phased out, you know. And hey, listen, there's civilian control of the military in this government. And the military isn't performing the way that the president wants. By whatever criteria the president decides on, he can get rid of him. That's the nature of the system. You know, I think he did have a responsibility. So now, what happens? Eighteen months later, almost to the date, Obama makes his announcement. And you know, everybody knows he's going to pull out some troops. The military had been advising, "Well, listen, keep it to 3,000, 5,000. We're just getting going," you know. He's announced that he's going to start pulling out all of the surge troops. And he didn't say this explicitly, but that meant that we were reverting to a strategy pretty much like what Biden had recommended. The counter-terrorism instead of president. And now, he could paint this as a victory because in the meantime, he'd killed Osama bin Laden. He really had -- Petraeus really had decimated the Taliban fighters on the ground. A lot of them were replaced by other Taliban fighters, but still you could charge them. So he said, "You kind of did a mission accomplished that." And it was a little misleading. In terms of the original goals, which were to degrade the Taliban, keep al-Qaeda out of the country, knock off bin Laden, we did all that. But the reason for sending in those additional 33,000 troops was to mount something like a counter-insurgency strategy, at least in the South. And that hadn't worked. And now he was retreating from that. Do you think that that refutation of coin by Obama is sort of a return to Rumsfeldianism as it were? Not quite Rumsfeldianism, but it is a dropping of coin. I mean, a year later, just this last February of 2012, Obama comes out with a new strategic review, which he did in not just consultation, but it was a joint exercise with the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense. And what gained the most in the papers about this was the so-called pivot from Europe to Asia. But another part of this, which was noticed by many people, the characters in my book, was where he talked about the end of nation building. And he instructed the army and the Marines that they shall no longer size their forces for large-scale, prolonged stability operations. Now translated in English, that means that when you do your calculations of how many troops you need, do not, you are prohibited from assuming in these calculations any scenario, which assumes that you will be fighting, basically, stability operations, counterinser, something like Iraq and Afghanistan. Not going to happen. And so what we do see a reversion to is it is Rumsfeldian in the sense of, you know, small, yeah, revolution in military affairs, small footprint, drone strikes, small commander raids, you know, the kind of thing we're seeing now, or I've seen recently in Libya, Mali, Uganda, Sudan. But, you know, it's different from Rumsfeld in a broader sense. And the Rumsfeld saw this as a way of creating the world in our image, basically, of really knocking off bad guys, you know, toppling regimes. What are the terms of army tactics? In terms of army tactics. And, you know, what this does, it does, yes, in terms of you're an army, if you're a career army officer, you have now got to be thinking, what is the army going to do? What is the mission of the army? Okay. Major combat operations? Well, you know, I don't see Russia invading Western Europe. If there's a war with China, it's not going to be a ground war. The small-scale stuff, that's basically in the province of Special Forces. And now, the president has told me we're not going to do large-scale, prolonged stuff like ours. Stability. So, what are we doing? What is my mission? What is my goal? And it's interesting. You know, during the last decade, you know, well, many years ago, they constructed out in the deserts of Western California, the National Training Center, which in the days of the Cold War, there would be these tank-on-tank maneuvers that were, they were war games. You know, the good guys and bad guys, it was really US and Soviet, they called it, you know, the Soviet army was played by the 10th Mountain Division, and they called themselves the Krasnovians. There was this whole scenario. But it learned how to do tank warfare out there. When Iraq and Afghanistan happened, they started erecting these fake Iraqi and then Afghan villages, and they hired exiles to play the role. Some guy played the mayor, somebody played the insurgents, somebody played. And it was really useful training. Well, now. What are they doing now? What they have now, they call it full spectrum operations. They have a little bit of everything out there. You do some tank maneuvers, which nobody has done in a decade, then you do a little bit of, you know, dealing with the people, waiting hearts and minds, you know. What's really going on? You know, I mean, a case can be made that we maybe need, the army needs to relearn some of what used to be called its core skills, you know. Well, you know, maneuvering with tanks, you know, firing artillery rounds, you know, they'll hold generation of army soldiers and officers that come along who had never done this before. So you know, but what are they doing? It's a little bit of everything, but you know, you can't really do a little bit of everything. You still have to set priorities. You still have to have criteria for promoting officers. You have to inculcate a certain culture within the army. And yeah, we're in kind of an interregnum now where it's unclear just what the culture of the army is. Where do you think it should go? Well, I mean, you know, nobody can, you know, General Dempsey, who's an army officer who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says, "Well, you know, you can't predict any battles that's going to take place. You've got to be prepared for everything." Well, especially in a time of declining resources, you can't. One thing that General Oderna, who is the chief of staff of the army, is trying to do. Oderna started out the Iraq war as an old-fashioned artillery officer who banged down doors. Over the course of the war, he became a real convert to counterinsurgency. He's very much trying to keep that line of thinking alive. He's appointing the generals who are in the promotion boards. He's appointed some of these counterinsurgency guys to keep positions. He wants to make sure, see, here's what's been happening in American military history. Every generation, we find ourselves getting involved in one of these insurgency wars. But what happened was the last one was so awful that the generals coming out of it threw away all the training manuals that emerged from it, threw out all the lessons, decided we're not doing that ever again. And so thinking that one way that you ensure that you're never going to do it again is not to train to do it again. The problem, of course, is that sometimes you don't have a choice. Or sometimes, well, in all these cases, it's the politicians who get you involved in these. I know a lot of these counterinsurgency generals thought invading Iraq was really a stupid idea, but once you're there, then what do you do? So what a guy like Oderna is interested in doing is making sure that 20, 25 years from now, when we get into another war like this, there is at least a core of officers. There at least is a body of literature that the officers coming into it can draw on so that they know how to fight these kinds of things. So that the first five years isn't as disastrous as the first five years of Iraq was. Again, having some sense of institutional knowledge? And there is a side of the story in the book where the Iraq war is going badly, Rumsfeld is up on the hill getting hammered, and he says, "Well, you know, there's no book on how to fight this thing." Well, I know there were plenty of books on how to fight this thing, and he just didn't know about any of them. Now, one of the interesting characters I found in the course of the book was Dave Kilkallen, an Australian soldier and sociologist, I suppose? Well, anthropologist, but yeah. And there's an interesting passage where Kilkallen starts to confront the doubts about serving the Bush administration and serving the war effort. Right. Kilkallen, he was Australian. He was brought over for a conference on irregular warfare, which was another euphemism that these kinds of words were called. And you know, Australians have been fighting these kinds of words a lot. So he came over with a PowerPoint presentation, which spelled out the aims pretty clearly in a way that nobody else has. There was a guy from the Pentagon there who said, "Come work for me. We need guys like you." And so he gets drawn into this community, and he wrote a lot of memos and manuals. He was a special assistant to portray us in Iraq for a while. And so, you know, by about the middle of 2007, everything is going his way. He has a reason to feel good about himself, but he's realizing that people are getting this all wrong. And in the meantime, he had come under attack. He and some others had come under attack from a group of radical anthropologists who were upset that these counterinsurgency guys were using principles of sociology to advance what they called a "neal-imperialist adventure" and causing more casualties. He'll call and get to an exchange with these guys, and he said, "Look, you know, for one thing, there's a lot of data I could show you. You know, this actually reduced casualties. But secondly, look, I didn't get us into this war. I'm just, you know, a policy aide. I have no court. I plead no case for the Bush administration, but, you know, that's not my job. This is a political thing. If you want to get rid of the politicians, you go to an election, and you vote them out. But then the more he thought about it, he was an advisor to Condi Rice, Secretary of State at this time. The more he thought about it, he didn't think these guys were right, but he thought they had a point in that, Gee, you know, as an expert, maybe I should be advising on matters, not just of how to carry out the policy that you've messed yourself into, but in the policy itself. And so, already organized was a plan to, there was this big effort to write a counter-insurgency manual for the civilian government, you know, to parallel the counter-insurgency field manual that Petraeus had written for the army. Most of the agencies dropped out of this, because, I mean, actually, if you think about it, the United States isn't set up for a colonial government. I mean, postwar Britain, France, and the colonial operations, the entire government was dedicated to this. Here, the United States, yeah, Justice, FBI, Agriculture, Commerce, they have operations going on in all these places, but they want nothing to do with the military. They want nothing to do with the U.S. foreign policy. That would discredit them. So it never happened. But Petraeus, I mean, Cohen went ahead and wrote this manual, and he wrote it not for working bureaucrats, but for policymakers. And it had lines in it like, "It is folly, it is folly to get involved in a counter-insurgency operation abroad if it appears that the government you're helping has no interest in reforming itself, or it has different interests from you." And you said, you know, policymakers must first calculate whether this is the case before you get involved in an operation. Now, the thing is, this manual went nowhere. It was signed and published in mid-January of 2009. Right before the president. So we before Obama comes in, new guys tend not to look at anything that the old guys have done, especially that reason. Plus, this was a little bit off the wall even from the old guys. This didn't really reflect large thinking, widespread thinking in the Bush administration. But if people had actually read this manual and had taken it seriously, then maybe the balance of power within these internal deliberations on what to do in Afghanistan might have gone differently. Now, shifting gears is one of the questions I've had about the Arab Spring for the few years since it began. Do you think it would have begun without Iraq particularly falling? I have this notion that the video of Saddam Hussein being pulled out of a spider hole and eventually being led to the gallows somehow resonates in a way that maybe we don't get, but in terms of breaking down the idea of invincibility for dictatorships over there. I just wondered if you think- Yeah, I think not in the way that Bush booksmen say so. I mean, if you're a democratic activist in some of these countries in the Middle East or just doesn't even put it in that term, someone, you know, crying out for freedom, crying out for Iraq, the example of Iraq is not going to be very encouraging. Well, not post Iraq, but at least that- Well, but that's what I know. I'm talking about just, okay, you know, this is what happens when we overthrow our leaders. Well, Jesus, if this is what happens when we overthrow our leaders, I want no part of it. On the other hand, I mean, it's definitely the case that once you start messing with the order of things, I mean, Iraq, let's forget about the internal politics of all these countries. Let's talk about just the balance of power within the region. Iraq was kind of a pivotal player. I mean, it was a Sunni stronghold bordering with Iran, which was a Shia stronghold, had alliances with other Sunni's. I mean, these were in terms of politics that most Americans didn't even know existed before all this. Much of the president who was proud of never traveling outside of the U.S. before he was voted in. Right. I think when the order starts to crumble, it does decay authority in other places as well. It undermines the political balance of power, and so in that sense, it could have created the conditions for instability, and when instability happens, people who have been left out of power, suddenly make plays for power. But I don't think the way that, for example, Bush's second inauguration speech where he's looking out at things that were happening at the time in Lebanon and Ukraine, the Green Revolution, the Orange Revolution, say there was a march to freedom going on, and then it all very quickly went to hell in those places. But in that sense, I do not think anybody in the Middle East who was interested in democracy and freedom would look out at the fate of Iraq and say, yes, march to freedom, there's our model. Although it did give us the great irony of Syria's rebels now being armed over the Iraqi border, which -- You speak all the way around, yeah. So much for a friend who will be an ally in the war on terror. One other question I had, you portray us as, again, falling into the same orthodoxy just regarding coin as opposed to sort of the major combat operations, the anti-mooch one established it before. How do you think that's a failing on his part or something in the nature of the institution of the army to keep -- Well, I think it's a nature of revolution, sort of. I mean, there's a tendency for revolutionaries to become calcified in their own thinking, for revolutions to become calcified, when creative ideas and doctrines get hardened into dogma. I mean, when he was in Afghanistan, you know, there's something to keep in mind. When Petraeus took over his top commander in Iraq, that was his third tour of duty there. He really knew Iraq and the people around him knew Iraq. So he and his whole entourage come into Afghanistan, they don't know Afghanistan. So they're looking at the world through the prism of where they've been successful, which is a natural thing that all of us do. But, you know, I interviewed well over 100 people for this book and several of them who have been working for Petraeus in Afghanistan told me that, you know, a problem would come up. And he would say, well, you know, in Anbar, we worked it this way, or in Mosul, we did it that way. At one time, there was a meeting with Karzai, and Karzai talks about some problem. And Petraeus says, well, you know, in Baghdad, the way we did this was X, you know, to the prism of Afghanistan. So coming out of the meeting, one of Petraeus's aides, who had worked both in Iraq and Afghanistan, said, you know, it might be a useful intellectual experiment for you to try not to think about Iraq at all. And he said, I'm working on it. And you know, he knew this. He knew this. And one of these PowerPoint presentations that he gave visitors, there was one slide which read Iraq is not Afghanistan. There was also one slide which read storm clouds, things that would go wrong. And the things that could go wrong was basically the same list that Galula had in his list of conditions that, you know, what could go wrong while the corrupt government, the insurgents on the border. You know, he kind of knew that this was a different order of a challenge. But you know, you're in the army, you know, you can do, I don't know, I've never met any unassuming four star generals, if such a creature exists, it's probably very bad general. And then Petraeus threw his own history, you know, all the stuff that he did kind of on his own accord, you know, all these little freelance things that he did without any authority and that he did on his own authority and that worked. He may have been a bit more unassuming than, I mean, he might have been a bit more assuming than most. What about side questions which I know came up in the New York Times a few years ago and got highlighted again in the book, do you think PowerPoint makes the army stupid? It has become, it has become the motive of communication and it has been for like a decade. And of course, the critique of PowerPoint is that it oversimplifies things, you just got these dot dot dot. Everything's a bullet point, yeah. Petraeus would try to correct for this. He came up with these famous PowerPoint briefings that, you know, looked like, I mean, you know, just incredibly complicated, just, I mean, almost parodies of PowerPoint with charged read, it almost looks like one of these crazy, you know, you see these, these crazy things with circles and lines that conspiracy theorists, and they just look insane. Now when he narrated the PowerPoint, it all made sense. He's explaining it. You see, oh, yeah. So that's connected to this. And this is connected to that, but, but yeah, I think it has, this has become the lingua franca of the military and it is bad because it leads to simplified thinking. And also it leads to schematic, it leads to formulaic thinking. You come up with pet phrases and then you don't, I mean, there's a story that I have where this, this very intelligent woman who is working for General O'Gearno in Iraq named Emma Sky, this British woman who had been, she negotiated things in Kirkuk and in fact in the Middle East, knew the language, knew all the tribal structures and that sort of thing. So she's coming in for a briefing and there's this briefing where it's talking about, you know, referring to AIF, she says, what's AIF? She says, anti-Iraq forces, which was the term of art at the time for the insurgents. She goes, what are you talking about? These people are Iraqis. You have to understand what tribes they come from. You have to understand what interests they have. Otherwise, you're never going to be able to deal with them. They're not anti-Iraq. They're Iraq. They are Iraqis. You know. You see any way of getting around that or is that simply, again, an institution, that size? You just got out. It's a tough one. You, you look, everybody's extremely busy. I mean, I did, I reviewed for the New York Times last year that this, this biography of George Kennan by John Lewis Gaddis, the one who put a surprise. And one thing you, that strikes you about George Kennan, who was the guy who came up with all these ideas about containment. I mean, it's sort of the architect of US early Cold War policy. How did he come up with all these ideas? Well, during World War II, he went back and forth from Washington to Europe about seven times. Always by boat. You'd be able to see it for like two weeks. So what's he doing? He's reading. He's reading histories. And he's thinking. And he's writing long letters to his sister, kind of spelling out, kind of trying out these ideas, which these letters serve as sort of first drafts to the long letters that he wrote. You know, his policy. There was a famous thing he wrote as Ambassador Russia, the long telegram. It was like 46 pages, outlying the interests of the Soviet Union. Nobody would have time to think, nobody has time to think these days. Nobody has time to ponder, to read histories, much less to read or write 46 page memos. Although that is probably what's necessary. The world is messed up. Ever since the Cold War ended, the Cold War, while besides being a horrible thing, it was also a system of international order. It was an international system. Once it imploded, that system is gone. We're living in an interregnum now. It's an increasingly anarchic international system. It would be very good to have someone of the intellect of Kennan, who has some authority. When he was in the government at the time, he was a powerful guy. He actually went and talked with the president. It would be good to have somebody who has that kind of access who's just told, "Hey, go away for six months. Read a bunch of books. Think about this. Go around and talk to people. Think about this." So the PowerPoint is kind of the symbol of a government that is just rushed, that has too much to do, too little time on its hands, too many problems, domestic and foreign being thrown at you. I'm talking about it at every level, not just the president, not just the chair, anybody. They're all running around. They're scrambling through. They're rats and amaze. And so this incredibly oversimplified PowerPoint is the mode of communication because it's simple. It's easy. You can scan it very quickly. But it's too simple. It's too easy. True, true, perceptive ideas are rarely scannable. Speaking of which, tell me how you got into war writing or national security writing, I suppose. Well, it's a long story, but it's a long to go story. I won't tell the whole story. Well, when I was in college, initially I got interested in defense and defense budget. This was back in the '70s, early '70s. It was kind of a guns or butter thing. I was interested in social programs and stuff like this and the idea of trading off the military budget for, you know, take away money from the military and put it in, you know, food stamps or whatever. It was a subject. Yeah. As I got into it more, and as I started taking courses in international relations and that sort of thing, I started getting fascinated in that for its own sake. And the very first summer job I had in this realm, it was in the summer of 1975, I was about 21, and it was at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and I was a research assistant on a project about arms sales to Chile and Peru. I really started getting into this in a big way, and so then I went to graduate school at MIT where they had a security studies division of the political science department, and I started studying with people who had really held rather senior positions in the government. This was still '76 to '78, it was still very much Cold War times. I mean, I learned how to do the kinds of calculations, exchange calculations that they talked about with nuclear exchanges and calculations about conventional force structure and that sort of thing. And then in 1978, I went to work, I was at the grand age of 24, I became the defense policy advisor to Congressman Les Aspen and the U.S. House of Representatives. Now it was still when Aspen was kind of a maverick, he hadn't yet become chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, much less secretary of defense, he was so kind of a knowledgeable maverick. And so, you know, I've just learned a tremendous amount there, not only about weapons systems and budgets, but also about the way politics really works. And from there, is this, so now I'm getting into the, and then I wrote a book, I wrote my first book, The Wizards of Armageddon, which is actually very similar to this book. Wizards of Armageddon, which I wrote in 1983, it's about the small group of intellectuals mainly from the Rand Corporation, who invented nuclear deterrents strategy. This book is about the small group of officer intellectuals, and most of them from the West Point Social Science Department, who revived counterinserts since it's very similar. And then I got a job, this was in the early '80s, newspapers were looking for, quote unquote, experts to write about defense policy, that's when the New York Times hired Michael Gordon, Washington Post hired Jeff Smith, and the Boston Globe hired me to be their defense reporter, and that's what I did all through the '80s. And then, just as the Cold War ended, I became a Moscow bureau chief, you know, I said I want to get out of this defense stuff, and then I became the New York bureau chief for seven years, which I completely took out, and then, and then for a variety of reasons I left the globe and joined Slate, and the Iraq war was about to begin, and so I got into it again. I found your milieu. Yeah. Oh. Fred Kaplan, thanks so much for your time. Thank you. The insurgents, David Patreus, and the plot to change the American way of war is available in bookstores everywhere. If there are still bookstores, you can wear everywhere. And that was Fred Kaplan. You can find his war stories column on Slate.com and his jazz reviews at stereofile.com. I should add that Fred also wrote a neat book called 1959, The Year Everything Changed, a couple of years ago. I enjoyed that one a lot, but we didn't get a chance to talk about it in this conversation. We also didn't get to talk about his interests in jazz and high-end audio equipment. Maybe we can get him back on the show sometime and talk about that stuff. And that was the Virtual Memory Show. Thanks for listening. You can subscribe to the show and find past episodes on iTunes, or at my website, chimeraobscura.com. I'm your host Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]