The Washington Post has an article this morning that was bizarrely interesting to me. General Petraeus has sponsored a 19 year old Princeton ROTC student, Wesley Morgan, to spend his summer embedded in Iraq as a blogger with reporters credentials.
The good news is that bloggers are now recognized by the military as journalists, especially if they come from the same Ivy League school where Petraeus received his Ph.D. in military history. Mr. Morgan was given the call sign "Harry Potter" presumably so he could be "the boy who lived."
The bad news is that General Petraeus and others in the military are genuinely concerned that they are not attracting the caliber of officer to the military that they would like to see- not attracting or not retaining- and so a gung ho youth who has been obsessed with the military and their technology since childhood seems like someone to take the time to mentor.
Petraeus's willingness to be a mentor stems from a desire to position himself as the man who rebuilt the Army, people who have worked with him in Iraq and elsewhere say. He has been open about his desire to shape the officer corps into a group of highly educated thinkers and has surrounded himself with Rhodes Scholars and PhDs, a group that has come to be known as his brain trust.
"I think he's universally well known for finding smart people who are interested in doing things a little differently, and I think that's a major reason for his success," says Capt. Elizabeth McNally, a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who is Petraeus's speechwriter.
So Mr. Morgan goes to war and writes a blog about the experience entitled "Notes from Downrange".
It is an exaggeration to say that Mr. Morgan spent his summer in Iraq- more like a month. But that is dogs years compared with the experience of Katie Couric. Plus, he did spend time on patrol being shot at by RPGs and practicing first aid.
His blog is interesting and very well written. He fully understands his position of privilege as a reporter and the special treatment he is being awarded. He includes a glossary of terms. He is impressed like crazy by all the folks he meets, and he is quite sure Al-Qaeda is leading the current attacks on our forces.
The gunner spun in his turret and fired a quick burst from his M240 in the direction the fire had come from, while the MP sergeant in charge of the whole convoy checked with all the other vehicles to make sure they hadn’t been hit, but the shooter or shooters were already gone – back into the dense palms, where they couldn’t be found. A quick, typical, and poorly aimed al-Qaeda hit-and-run, too sloppy to have much chance at causing damage but still well planned enough to make pursuit all but impossible.
That’s the nature of the war up here, in the rural areas north of Baghdad: based out of Tarmiya and blending easily into the population, the local footsoldiers of al-Qaeda strike at U.S. patrols and convoys every day, and are hunted when possible by Apaches, Strykers, drones, and infantrymen, with SOF striking against high-value targets in the dead of night. The RPG attack, like the shooting and IED incident earlier on, was a reminder that in this AO, between Taji and Tarmiya, the Manchus are not building soccer fields or organizing neighborhood councils as on Haifa Street: here, they are fighting Wahhabi extremists tooth and nail, with Hellfires, .50 cals, M4s – and willpower.
He writes without a trace of irony. I italicized a line in particular that made me wonder if he ever spoke with local people on these patrols, to realize that their children might be in the way of the "high value targets." Would the children be "low value targets" to be avoided, so you wouldn't waste the ammunition? The language and technology of the military have taken hold of Mr. Morgan- he is profoundly interested in the process of warfare. The purpose of this war is not discussed.
He is clearly not completely naive. He discussed a GPS communication unit being tried by the patrol. They are not satisfied with its performance- which is great when it actually works but cuts out and is unreliable. Mr. Morgan comments that the generals and others ask for direct feedback on such equipment, but:
I suppose the lesson is, but no soldier with reasonable ambitions of advancement, whether a major or a private, wants to be the bearer of disappointing or frustrating news like 4-9’s (an anonymous platoon member) about Land Warrior.
Irony once again is missing from the blog.
Still, Mr. Morgan is no fool. His reporting is clear about the frustration the troops are experiencing in "The Surge." They long for the all out invasion of towns like Diwaniya in 2004.
"Diwaniya had nothing to do with counterinsurgency," Peterson says. "We road-marched overnight to Kalsu, staged there, and attacked from there right into the city. It was an intense, 36-hour fight for the whole squadron against a heavily armed enemy, followed by two-and-a-half weeks of consolidation. It was a straight-up kinetic attack against an entrenched enemy, and the soldiers loved it." That last part was definitely borne out by my conversations with the task force’s soldiers, particularly the infantrymen of C/5-20 (Charlie Rock) – "It was just fucking awesome," one sergeant told me, "it was like Black Hawk Down – we rolled into that city, people just disappeared as we went in, and there were guys in black pajamas with RPGs, AKs, sniper rifles, you name it. We fucking broke them." Dozens of soldiers I spoke to, frustrated by the low-intensity operations now underway on Haifa Street, looked back on Diwaniya as the high point of their deployment or even of their time in the Army. (Within weeks, Diwaniya was back in the hands of the Mahdi Army – after 1-14 was pulled out, there was no replacement unit, and this summer the Polish and Iraqi bases outside Diwaniya have been subjected to the most intense rocket and mortar attacks that they have endured since the Mahdi Army rebellion of 2004.)
So some irony after all, between the parentheses. There is a real desire to just have a war, against an identifiable enemy, preferentially one overwhelmed by our superior warfighter technology. But then, while Mr. Morgan was posted in Iraq the governor and police chief of Dinwaniya province was killed, marking the return on internal Shia rivalry. This was posted August 14 and the assassination occurred August 11. Even made the news here briefly.
Interesting to me was how this trip was funded- Mr. Morgan was sponsored by:
Public Multimedia, Inc., a tax-exempt news organization founded by Bill Roggio. PMI aims to provide original reporting and analysis of the Long War, and relies on donors to do this.
Once again, didn't know you could be a tax-exempt News Organization. Unless you are Jeff Gannon and have other income sources, how can a news organization supported by donations be considered objective in any way?.
I was also intrigued by the term "The Long War." Apparently "Global War on Terror" is too vague, plus everyone knows, even Bush, you can't win a war on terror really. So we have morphed the whole thing, with the support of The Heritage Foundation into "The Long War." This is to be something like "The Cold War" you remember that brand- so popular while it lasted, until we won, and briefly had a few months of peace during the remaining years of the Bush I administration. Until that weasel Clinton opened America to shame with Blackhawk Down and the first World Trade Center bombing.
Read the whole blog- it is very fascinating and picaresque look into the war- much better and true reporting that many mainstream stories. Mr. Morgan is an authentic voice and very observant. For example:
At Prosperity, Peterson had briefed the squad not to drink any water that was offered to us and, more importantly, to stay away from the refreshments tents and be on the lookout for men with the characteristics of a suicide bomber (immaculately clean robes, unusual bulk, being clean-shaven, looking high, etc.), but as soon as we hit the ground both generals gravitated immediately toward the refreshment tents, brushing off the security troops’ objections. "Take note, young Jedi," one sergeant said to me as the colonel and generals and their staffs crowded into a tent full of black-clad Shia and Iraqi commandos in bizarre camouflage, "this is what we call a complete clusterfuck." Had there been just one sniper in a nearby building, let alone the suicide bomber intel had warned about, the generals’ entourage would have been a mouth-watering target, especially since the clustered officers stayed locked in conversation with the same group of Iraqis for a good twenty minutes.
Generals not listening to the ground troops in Iraq. Go figure.
Out of the mouths of babes.
