The one honest voice from the front lines

To see what a restaurant’s kitchen looks like, just check the restroom. Counterinsurgency—especially when much of the world is watching—is the most complex form of warfare and requires our most agile commanders and soldiers. As with the restroom to kitchen analogy, there is a simple litmus test in this war for commanders who are able to win counterinsurgency battles. Check their press. Good or bad, there should be some; little or none is a bad sign, especially if the enemy is using media.

Some in the military even now disparage this general for his embrace of media, for understanding that complex counterinsurgency warfare can only be successful when the media battles are decisively won. He once corrected a junior officer who wanted to track media coverage according to whether the reports were “positive” or “negative,” saying that it only mattered that the reports were accurate, since it was how the soldiers did THEIR job that would largely determine the way people on all sides reacted to news, so long as it was accurate. This General’s name is David Petraeus.

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By my fourth or fifth month in the war, I had learned that moving around from unit to unit led to a tired writer doing a dozen or two missions without writing a word. Communications were an incessant problem. But someone in the Deuce Four must have read Ernie Pyle’s article about how the 9th Division became a media magnet . Because when the Deuce Four gave me a trailer and an internet line and all the missions I could handle, I stayed.

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