Former CIA Director Finds The Wizard of Oz

This week, my daughter drove me down to Virginia to a book signing. It was hosted by the American Legion Post 250 and organized by former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell for former CIA Director General David Petraeus. It was well worth the pilgrimage to little Middleburg, VA. Over 200 people were in attendance, and they were perhaps the friendliest crowd I’ve ever met.

We were lucky enough to have a few minutes with Mike Morell, and I found him to be a very nice guy in person. The same is true for his wife and all the people who arranged the event. Gary, the head of the post was remarkably warm, and it was fun to watch him try to tell a retired 3-star general that he couldn’t sweep the floor (lol, yes, the general got his way and got his broom).

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to spend time with General Petraeus. For the price of a $40 hardcover, I got a smile, a handshake, and a really quick picture. He did, however, speak for over an hour about his book. I’ve always admired the general, and he didn’t disappoint. I found him to be a person of maximum intelligence, and wisdom, and a man with great communication skills. In a room filled with hundreds of people who made careers out of speaking Pentagon-Acronym as a second language, not once did he resort to abbreviations. That took some effort.
He was acutely aware of everyone in the room, and sure as the Sun was going to rise, he shot me a look the one time I kind of half rolled my eye at something. It’s probably not something a 4-star CIA Director gets to see in an audience often. I liked the man before the evening, and now I’m more than a little humbled as I see him as an important character in the volumes of American history.

The book is called, “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine” By General Petraeus and Andrew Roberts. It’s a fantastic book. It’s well worth the price. I gave it a 5-star review on Amazon, and I suggest everyone get a copy for their bookshelf as a reference. It starts with the Chinese Communist Revolution and then lists most of the wars from all over the globe to the drone/trench warfare of the Ukraine today. The book has a lot of good information about tactics and strategies from squad levels through to the top strategic commander level.

This strategic commander level is the focus of the story, and it should be. Some people make great soldiers. Some great soldiers make good platoon leaders. Some good platoon leaders can lead companies, and some company commanders might make good division leaders. General Petraeus is one of the few of the few of the few and so on who was all of those, AND he became an excellent strategic commander. It is no secret to the American people and our enemies that the Pentagon is filled with good company commanders who have politically made it to strategic levels without matching capabilities to higher ranks and roles. One need look no further than the morons who abandoned Afghanistan but remain in positions of leadership and supreme management despite having neither.

In addition to the list of criteria that all strategic commanders need to face, the book reiterates that post-WWII military conflicts do not succeed with just a focus on military operations. There has to be an equal or even greater effort at providing security for the civil population, and an effort toward civil reconstruction and construction that makes life better for the civilian population; civil/military/security.

Why did I roll my eyes? The book also repeats something else, but they don’t highlight it. Whether it’s the Communist Chinese in the first real post-WWII conflict, Malaysian rebels, or the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, General Petraeus ends almost all the stories the same way. He explains why one force succeeded or failed, then states something akin to ‘facing strong popular opposition at home’ or ‘without the support of the population’, and then he states “XYZ” war was lost. They see it, and they state it, and then the writers ignore it: even more important than the civilian/military/security triad, there has got to be support from home.

Petraeus states right at the opening of the book, “The Prussian military philosopher and theorist Carl von Clausewitz described warfare as politics by other means, and just as politics did not end in 1945, neither has warfare.” The definition I’ve known for 45 years is a bit different: “War is one nation, state, or nation-state imposing its political will upon another nation, state, or nation-state through violent means.” (Dr. Worthington, Walsh Jesuit High School 1986). If one looks at every example of evolution in warfare as described in the book from 1945-2024, it’s clear that every war starts with a nation or population that demands war (see also 911), or a state or nation-state that wages war regardless of the population (see also Vietnam). Similarly, the wars are won or lost based on the attitude of the entity that demanded and started the war. If a population demands war and comes to oppose it, then no amount of civil/military/security will bring about success. If a state government decides to wage war and then decides it’s boring, or too expensive, then the war is equally lost. When the American people got tired of Afghanistan, 20 more years of civil/military/and security operations were for naught. In May 2003, literally weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, no less than a dozen prominent Democrats in Congress declared their candidacy for President and also declared the war in Iraq as lost.

General Petraeus also mentions something a few times that too many officers and government officials forget. A general should never talk about politics. There are several times when generals or government officials the war is going well when it’s not, or that they can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Such commentary almost always leads to inaccuracy and a loss of trust among the entity that started and needs to support the war effort. How many tens of thousands of times did intelligence about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan get leaked to the press for political purposes: specifically to politically undermine support for the war as a means of petty, personal political progress? How many times did generals or national security advisors tell us Vietnam was being won? Why was MacArthur fired? Why were there so many different commanders in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, (Somalia), and Afghanistan?

And there it is: General Petraeus walks readers down a yellow brick road for hundreds of pages, and when we get to the Emerald City, we pull back the curtain and find….

…no one is really in charge. We can have squad leaders and division commanders, admirals, and strategic commanders, but no one is in charge. Not since Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and MacArthur was like a God over a defeated Japan there has never been a single commander coordinating the three pillars that General Petraeus outlined civil/military/and security as well as making sure that the entity which started the war-maintained support for the war.

Since 1945 we’ve had generals in charge of armies, or even in charge of all forces in a region, but civilian departments run separate chains of command without direction from a supreme commander. In Vietnam no one coordinated efforts between the State Department’s international efforts and the civil/military/security efforts on the ground in theatre. Civilian leaders as high as the President often tried to micromanage the war with impossible rules of engagement or useless airstrike targets, and this dragged the war on for years. In Iraq the State Department came on the scene and unilaterally, arbitrarily fired the entire Iraqi Army and all the bureaucrats. This led directly to a decade of civil war, and hundreds of thousands of lives, then popular loss. The same thing happened in Afghanistan where diplomatic efforts and efforts by other civilian departments to assist in the war caused confusion, and more dangerous situations, and brought about stalemate before rout.

This is why I rolled my eye – General Petraeus could see the problem, and mention it, but he ignored it. The lesson of General Petraeus’ book isn’t that wars succeed based on his triad of civil/military/security operations. It’s that there is a fourth leg holding up the table: support from the entity that started the war. Not since 1945 has there been a military or civilian who ran a war and made sure that every civilian department could assist in success as much or even more than the military’s involvement. He pulled back the curtain, and there was no Wizard of Oz. Just a grown-up frat boy, a neighborhood community organizer, a near-senile old man, or some used car salesman.

Congress authorizes war. Presidents are supposed to run wars, but not since Eisenhower has there been a President who knew the difference between a frigate and a littoral combat ship. In the future, Presidents need to appoint someone else to run their wars-theatre commanders like in World War II. Have representatives from all the civilian departments under their command to aid in the war effort, and if they can’t then “they can sit under a tree until they can.”-Gen. Petraeus. When America goes to war, it’s a matter of millions of lives, and deaths, and only the best qualified should lead. Let them report to the President, and Congress, but this idea of a single general running the military aspect, ignoring the civil and security aspects, and just letting politicians play with the war’s supporters…this combination hasn’t worked.

Since 1945-until today’s war in Ukraine in 2024, the Wizard of Oz has just been a guy in a position that always needs the most powerful of wizards.