First off let's be clear about who David Petraeus is. He is someone who takes credit where credit is not due. Someone who is very competitive and has shown that he cares little for the line troops that make his commands. Some of the only interactions that his men have had with him have involved him choppering in and pinning a purple heart on the lucky man that is pointed out to him by his aides and hopping back on the chopper. It's the best way to maintain those starched cammies. This guy was responsible for securing the weapons and explosive caches in Iraq. He was not supposed to rush to glory by bypassing towns to try to enter Baghdad first. He was supposed to destroy or guard all those AK-47's currently being used to shoot our troops to death, and he was supposed to stop the distribution all tons of explosives to bomb makers in Iraq. You have to understand the nickname Betrayus came from Iraq. There is not a 11B who doesn’t know this nickname. It’s his fuckups with weapons and explosives that garnered him the name. He was also supposed to train the Iraqi security forces. You remember those. The ones were we had 100 battalions, and then we have 23 battalions and then 3. The more security forces Petraeus trained the fewer we had. They sent his ass back to Kansas after that debacle.
This was where he decided to rewrite the COIN manual. Why a conventional forces commander with real no counter insurgency experience (certainly no successes,) would feel the urge to rewrite the COIN manual is beyond me and most of the Special Ops' crowd. What he did basically was remove the parts that disagreed with the tactics he used in Iraq and republished. They only reason for this rewrite was his access. The Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth is responsible for this sort of thing. I guess there were no actual academics hanging around the Staff War College to give him a hand. No, no Ace Wonderboy Dave Petraeus would take care of that himself. A brilliant mind. The kind of mind that looks at the counter insurgency problem in Iraq and comes up with the shocking approach of ... more troops! Finally, we all know that the reason that Bush picked him to replace General Casey was he would jump at the chance to serve his masters and not his men. Tell me David Petraeus did not walk up to capital hill and do exactly that. Mission? What mission? Have fun in the big sandy boys' see ya!
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