“Fred Kaplan, one of the best military journalists we have, tells the compelling story of how a cadre of officers and civilians tried to rescue victory from defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan by putting the theory of counterinsurgency into practice, revolutionizing the US Army from within. An authoritative, gripping and somewhat terrifying account of how the American military approached two major wars in the combustible Islamic world.' Kaplan, a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter … knows the military world inside and out. 'There is no one better equipped to tell the story. Petraeus and his fellow insurgents made the US military more adaptive to the conflicts of the modern era, but they also created the tools-and made it more tempting-for political leaders to wade into wars that they would be wise to avoid. But it is also a cautionary tale about how creative doctrine can harden into dogma, how smart strategists-today’s “best and brightest”-can win the battles at home but not the wars abroad. This is a story of power, politics, ideas, and personalities-and how they converged to reshape the twenty-first-century American military. Amid the crisis, they forged a community (some of them called it a cabal or mafia) and adapted their enemies’ techniques to overhaul the culture and institutions of their own Army.įred Kaplan describes how these men and women maneuvered the idea through the bureaucracy and made it official policy. McMaster, and others-many of them classmates or colleagues in West Point’s Social Science Department who rose through the ranks, seized with an idea of how to fight these wars better.

But the main insurgency is the one mounted at home by ambitious, self-consciously intellectual officers-Petraeus, John Nagl, H. These would be wars not only of fighting but of “nation building,” often not of necessity but of choice.īased on secret documents, private emails, and interviews with more than one hundred key characters, including Petraeus, the tale unfolds against the backdrop of the wars against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their aim was to build a new Army that could fight the new kind of war in the post–Cold War age: not massive wars on vast battlefields, but “small wars” in cities and villages, against insurgents and terrorists. The Insurgents is the inside story of the small group of soldier-scholars, led by General David Petraeus, who plotted to revolutionize one of the largest, oldest, and most hidebound institutions-the United States military.

The Insurgents by Fred Kaplan