All In (19 page)

While there was no insurgency in Haiti, there might well have been. Criminals robbed, terrorized and killed their countrymen. To respond, Petraeus recommended to the force commander that units base their troops out among the remote villages, which was a significant change to the previous U.S. practice of deploying conventional forces only in the country's two biggest cities.

In peacekeeping, as in counterinsurgency, Petraeus saw the people as the center of gravity. He worked closely with civilian aid groups, attempted to build up the Haitian police, staged raids to arrest fugitive leaders of paramilitary groups and started committing U.S. funds for desperately needed capital improvement projects. He also helped organize the voter registration process, a pillar of nation building. After he was told in a briefing that the process was ready to begin in five days, he visited a warehouse where registration supplies were being assembled and found “sheer chaos.” He went to the U.S. helicopter battalion and asked if he could clear out its hangar so that the team could spread the election materials out on the floor. It was raining hard every afternoon during that season, and there was no other place to do it. The pilots moved their birds. Petraeus and the team helped move and organize the materials and then supported their movement to sites throughout Haiti. Registration was completed on schedule.

“Haiti was a great civil-military experience, a wonderful learning experience in terms of what nation building is all about, especially in a country that was one of the three poorest in the world at that time,” Petraeus later reflected. He also noted that serving in an international coalition was an invaluable experience. The largest international coalition (in terms of countries) ever assembled awaited him in Kabul. “It's very easy in these kinds of missions, where the U.S. is so dominant, just to dominate, and yet that isn't the right course,” he observed. “It's about keeping everybody with you. It's about making sure that the Nepalese battalion is as satisfied as the United States contingent.”

His Haiti experience would prepare him well for many aspects of Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet while the country resembled a war zone, it hadn't counted as a combat tour. He would have to wait eight more years for a combat patch on his right shoulder.

His next assignment awaited upon his return to the United States in June 1995: command of the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Only the best and the brightest—those officers with the potential to make general—became combat brigade commanders in the Army. Petraeus would be replacing another star, Colonel John Abizaid. He couldn't take command soon enough.

While both men shared superb reputations and similar beliefs about the Army's need to prevail in low-intensity conflicts and counterinsurgencies, their styles were strikingly different. Abizaid was loose and more laid-back. Petraeus was intense, competitive and highly structured. While Abizaid was happy to relax over a beer with his men after a maneuver, Petraeus wanted to conduct an after-action review—and then challenge everyone to a run—and then have a beer.

As an outsider who had never served in the 82nd before, Petraeus faced jealousy from some of his peers there—and elsewhere in the Army—who had served in combat in Panama or the Gulf with the division.

Petraeus's battalion commanders were aware of his intense competitive streak and his preference for a “systems approach.” But at Bragg, Petraeus demonstrated that he'd learned to build a team rather than compete with the team. Five of his six infantry battalion commanders would become general officers, one would earn two stars (currently commanding the 82nd Airborne Division), two of them would become three-star generals, and another would earn four stars. All would serve in Iraq with Petraeus.

Commanding the “Devil Brigade,” Petraeus's command and leadership style flowered, according to Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Petit, one of the brigade's company commanders at the time. He remembers Petraeus's first meeting with all field-grade officers. “He held it in the chapel in Fort Bragg,” said Petit, who now refers to Petraeus as “Doc” in honor of his Ph.D. “Doc, I learned, never misses an opportunity to layer messages, both verbal and nonverbal. He proceeded to give his command philosophy, what was important to him. He began to question us tactically: ‘What is the maximum effective range of the machine gun?' ‘What are the three types of defensive wire?' It was a message that this was a level he wanted us to study. It is the paradox of rank that platoon leaders talk strategy and colonels and generals talk squads/platoons. So he established that this was the level at which we were expected to be experts.”

Petraeus also established a new convention for training at the time. He felt live-fire exercises were too scripted. “I want to tell you about what I call Walk and Shoot University,” Petraeus told his brigade's officers. “Army troopers do not have the skills we need to manage unscripted scenarios employing live fires, much less on a real-world deployment.” The typical exercise that employed mortars and artillery, as well as attack helicopters and close air support, was highly prescribed and was of limited training value.

Petraeus set out to change that. As Petit recalled, “We cleared into the impact area lanes in which we would walk and call live fire on objectives around us and in front of us, a huge departure from the very static, linear training we had done previously,” recalled Petit. “We responded in part because we broke rules to do it and we felt we were ‘special' and clearly training with realism that no one else had to date.” Petraeus had actually gotten the required waivers, but no unit had done so in such an aggressive manner before.

Petraeus's focus on tactical expertise to outthink the enemy surfaced again in brigade command. The Joint Readiness Training Center, the Army's light-infantry training grounds, which Keane had done so much to develop, included a scenario not unlike the urban warfare Petraeus would later see in Iraq—with civilian role players, suicide bombers and IEDs.

In the scenario, when Petraeus's units came upon the enemy, the so-called opposing force, on the outskirts of the city, they were unprepared and asleep. The town's defenses were not complete, and some of the enemy were still installing wire and pickets and barriers. The opposing force, Petraeus correctly deduced, had made a timeline of their own, based upon an 0500 attack, which Petraeus's brigade had published. “Sir, you had me fooled right up to the moment I was crossing the wire into the objective,” Petit recalled. Petraeus looked at him and replied, “We defined the rules, then when the enemy defined their rules, we just changed ours.” Petit found it unprecedented that he would pull one over on the enemy—and his own troops—to create favorable conditions for the team to win. “You and the Devils continue to do better than I've ever seen it done,” e-mailed Brigadier General John Vines, the 82nd's assistant division commander for operations in March 1997.

After two years in command of the brigade, Petraeus headed up the East Coast yet again, for another tour at the Pentagon. This time it was General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, requesting that Petraeus serve as his personal executive assistant. Petraeus had already seen the way the Pentagon functioned through the eyes of General Vuono, a service chief. Now he would come to understand the building from the all-important “joint” vantage point, in which all four military services worked, planned supported operations together—and, sometimes, fought with each other.

Working for Shelton, Petraeus gained exposure to civil-military relations at the highest levels. He had a superb vantage point from which to view the workings of the Clinton administration, the National Security Council and senior decision making. Petraeus also interacted daily with counterparts in the secretary of Defense's office, on the National Security Council staff, and at the State Department. Given Shelton's background as the commander of the Special Operations Command, Petraeus learned at the foot of a boss who thought about the balance between conventional and Special Operations Forces in a different way than the infantry officers with whom Petraeus had previously served. Contingency operations during his time with Shelton included the Iraq no-fly zones (northern and southern), the peacekeeping operation and war criminal hunt in Bosnia, counterterrorist operations focused on Osama bin Laden, kinetic strikes in Iraq after Saddam Hussein thumbed his nose at the international community and, in Shelton's second year, the Kosovo Air Campaign.

Petraeus then headed back to Fort Bragg to pin on his first star and serve as the 82nd's assistant division commander for operations. During a year full of training and contingency deployments, the 82nd would also send Petraeus to join the “general-of-the-month club” in Kuwait, where he led the Combined Joint Task Force–Kuwait (Operation Desert Spring)—a rotating contingent of three thousand soldiers in place for a month with the mission of deterring Saddam Hussein, assuring regional allies and supporting U.S. combined forces operations in theater.

Petraeus's last tour at Fort Bragg was as chief of staff for the XVIII Airborne Corps, the 82nd's parent organization. On the side, he enjoyed his addiction—skydiving with the Golden Knights, the Army's parachute team and other skydivers, until disaster struck: Petraeus's parachute lost air on a late turn and he crashed to the ground, leaving him with a fractured pelvis. Fortunately for Petraeus, his boss, Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, allowed him to work from home. McNeill knew Petraeus's capabilities and fitness, having had Petraeus as his assistant division commander when McNeill commanded the 82nd Airborne, and he was not about to lose him.

Petraeus asked the doctors to allow him to go swimming to speed his recovery and maintain a level of fitness. “No, absolutely not,” replied his physician. “You'll displace your pelvis; you know you're just held together with screws and plates that need to solidify.” Petraeus strapped a pull buoy between his legs and got in the pool anyhow. Keane, by now the Army's vice chief of staff, warned him against any more free-falling parachuting. “You give me a division and I'll stop skydiving,” Petraeus half-joked. He would give up free-fall skydiving, but within nine months he was back to running and static-line parachuting, as well as simulated free fall in Fort Bragg's wind tunnel.

Near the end of his tour as corps chief of staff, in the late spring of 2001, Petraeus was the corps's representative at a conference hosted by the Army's John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. The question the conference addressed was whether Army Green Berets should continue to emphasize training of and working with host-nation forces or instead focus more on kinetic tasks like targeted raids. The events of 9/11 would put an end to the debate. Within months of the conference, the Green Berets would be very much back in business with the tasks that had long been their forte, including riding horses into combat in northern Afghanistan.

The debate prompted Petraeus to think hard about his upcoming deployment to Bosnia, where he would work extensively with various types of Special Operations Forces. The experience served him well later in Iraq—and Afghanistan.

THE NIGHT RAIDS IN
Afghanistan during the fall of 2010 were largely the domain of the Joint Special Operations Command—and much more sophisticated than those Petraeus had participated in back in Bosnia. Petraeus had picked up the playbook for these operations from McChrystal, a Special Operations legend who had served as Petraeus's JSOC commander in Iraq during the surge in 2007.

In his morning briefings, Petraeus repeatedly stressed the performance of Special Operations Forces and their mandate to kill and capture Taliban leaders in night raids predicated on pinpoint intelligence—often communications intercepts, but also intelligence from human sources and imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles and tower-mounted optics. “Today's report on our nighttime raids again underscores that we must properly recognize the extraordinary courage of our small units and individual troopers who go out night after night into harm's way,” he said in a stand-up in late September. “These operations are having a critical effect and must not be seen as ‘just another day at the office.' This is extraordinary work which must be recognized appropriately.” Special Operations Forces were devastating the insurgent networks, and Petraeus wanted their work to spread. They were a key component in expanding the security bubbles in much of the country.

A ninety-day summary that coincided roughly with Petraeus's first three months in command broke down the “accumulated effects” of Special Operations Forces into two categories, “kinetic” and “non-kinetic.” There were 2,795 “kinetic” operations that resulted in the death or capture of 285 high-value insurgent leaders. An additional 889 insurgents were killed, and 2,084 midlevel insurgents were captured. On the “non-kinetic” side, Special Operations Forces carried out 1,823 population-centric operations.

The night raid operations were largely the business of secret “black” Special Operations Forces. Army Delta Force commandos and select Navy SEALs and Army Rangers are specially trained to capture high-value targets with great precision under the most difficult circumstances, including entrance to heavily guarded compounds.

Night raids in Afghanistan relied on tactical intelligence used to identify insurgent leaders and their precise locations. The National Security Agency and other units engaged in intercepting cell-phone, radio and Internet communications had made enormous strides since 9/11 in the speed with which they could process communications, determine exact locations and deliver data to Special Operations Forces. The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles with sophisticated optics provided real-time full-motion video, and human sources and other forms of intelligence provided important information as well. In some cases, night raids could now be planned and executed in a matter of minutes. In others, the intelligence picture would come together more slowly and required days, or even weeks, of careful surveillance, matched against signals intercepts, imagery and human intelligence. Virtually all the U.S. special-mission-unit night raids carried out on Petraeus's watch—about three hundred a month—were conducted in partnership with Afghan special-mission elements, highly trained and superbly equipped. Commanders at the Special Operations center at Bagram Air Base typically watched the raids in real time through various video feeds, including infrared video streamed by intelligence drones.