I assumed that this story (Petraeus Helping Pick New Generals) would get considerable play here, and elsewhere in the left blogosphere, but I guess not, so here goes my own inadequate, but better than nothing, take.
Our Army has an admirable history of remaining clearly subordinate to civilian control. This is not Pakistan. But while I suspect that most people assume without question that our generals and colonels would never move against their civilian masters just because they are Americans, goddammit, and therefore somehow congenitally incapable of coup behavior, I would give at least some of the credit to careful personnel practice over the decades. And I would worry that we are abandoning some of that careful practice just when it is most needed, when the Army is under considerable stress from toweringly stupid civilian controllers.
The Army has traditionally taken great pains, arguably at the expense of cohesion, to keep from developing personal clubs and ideological cliques within its ranks. This is mainly accomplished by reassigning soldiers and officers to a new unit, at some new base, every 2-3 years. But another important element has been centralized promotions and assignments. Commanders can't promote their personal coterie, or bands of like-minded officers, into higher rank and more important positions, because promotions and important assignments are handled by centralized boards run out of DA. General officer promotions and assignments have always been somewhat at the natural limits of this system's ability to insure against cronyism and cliques, because in a sense DA is the Village and the Club once you reach that high. The general officers' "Club" is small enough that the Colonels being considered for promotion to Brigadier General, much less from BG and on higher, can't really be evaluated impersonally by an objective board of strangers anymore.
Of course, there is always the possibility that I am reading too much into a story that basically has little more to it, beyond the break with precedent involved in having a theater commander serve as president of a Brigadier General promotion board, than the bloviative speculations on the signifigance of that break by MG (Ret) Scales, a LTC Nagl, and that ever-present participant in these discussions, the unnamed "senior defense official". But this is a general officer promotion board, already at the limits of what we can do institutionally to prevent cliques and coteries. And the Army since 2003 has, in a very real sense, been stationed all at the same "base", the Iraq theater, under the same command, and not spread out all over the world in separate units. And these three "experts", at least as reported by our valiant author, Ms Tyson, manage to put forward everything questionable about this arrangement as if it were something desirable. Petraeus was chosen to head the board so that he can put his personal doctrinal stamp, presumably something along the lines that counter-insurgency warfare is paramount, on the next generation of general officers.
At the very least, this amounts to the revelation that we are choosing a new generation of generals to fight the last war, a war that we will soon be exiting, a war that we should not have gotten into in the first place, and the sort of war that arguably (And this must have been the consensus in those dark benighted times before the advent of Petraeus, or we wouldn't stand in need of his personal supervision of a change in doctrine.), we should never get sucked into in the future. But our bloviators go much further down a very dark and ugly road. The Petraeus difference that we so much need this savior to deliver unto us, is characterized repeatedly not so much as counter insurgency, but as "informational warfare". Now, partly this informational warfare seems to be at least one weapon in the counter-insurgency arsenal, and therefore relevant in that repsect. But the quoted bloviators repeatedly characterize the connection of informational warfare to counter-insurgency not as one might expect, that our side needs to be able to understand "hearts and minds" in Iraq well enough to wage ideological war among Iraqis, but that the insurgency seeks to dishearten US minds to get us to give up, and that the proper role of US generals in a counter-insurgency is to wage informational warfare here in America, against defeatist politicians, like Petraeus did on Capitol Hill in September. Wow! Read it for yourself. I'm not making this stuff up.
Of course I'm just being my usual paranoid self in worrying about the obviously benign idea that we are allowing a political general to create a new generation of political generals in his own image and likeness. They just want to persuade lawmakers, in a totally benign, purely informational warfare mode, to see things their way. And if Congress, or some future President, doesn't see things their way...
I can't help thinking of what Al Capone once said, about a kind word often getting you what you want, but a kind word plus a gun always getting you what you want. Do we really want the guys with the guns pushing their noses into the political tent, if only to conduct "informational warfare?