Why Petraeus?

Yesterday, Secretary Gates announced the nomination of General Petraeus to Commander, Centcom, and General Odierno to replace General Petraeus at the field commander in Iraq. Why did President Bush and Secretary Gates make these nominations?

Let me first give two arguments against these nominations.

First, if you believe that Iraq, Afghanistan, and other such conflict have indefinite durations, it is imperative from an institutional perspective to broaden the experience base your corps of general officers (and all other soldiers for that matter) has with these conflicts. It is not sustainable to keep sending the same commanders back and back to the same theater. These commanders, as good as they may be, will eventually exhibit exhaustion and staleness in their thinking. Meanwhile other generals will never get experience. This is a bad practice if you believe “The Long War” will really be long.

Second, Generals Petraeus and Odierno are obviously very promising officers. But sending them repeatedly to Iraq “type-casts” them as specialists. There is talk of promoting in a few years General Petraeus to Chairman of the JCS. By the time General Petraeus finishes up at Centcom, he will have spent at least eight straight years on COIN. What will be missing is any recent experience with Pacific relationships, China, the Korean peninsula, cyber war, space operations, missile defense, Europe, neo-colonialism in Africa and Latin America, procurement plans and problems, etc. etc. Other CJCS nominees have had recent experience in areas such as these. That has not necessarily made them good chairmen. But at least they had more familiarity with these issues than General Petraeus will have.

So why General Petraeus? Secretary Gates called him “the best man for the job.” That’s true, but as explained above, it makes sense only if you have relatively short time frame in mind. The Bush administration must then believe that the Iraq war is in a culminating phase; this particular Long War won’t be so long after all. If the next year in Iraq will be decisive (or if President Bush wants to make it so), then it is not so important to worry about sustainability beyond that. Under that hypothesis, a president should put in his best players, and not worry about the fourth quarter of the game.

Perhaps even more important in this case is the issue of domestic politics. Having Generals Petraeus and Odierno, two proven successes, in Iraq will make things very difficult for a President Obama. President Obama would of course have all of the constitutional authority to execute any war policy he wanted. But he would have to do it against the advice of a popular and highly successful general. To override or remove General Petraeus would likely get the Obama administration off to an even worse start than did the gays-in-the-military dustup President Clinton had with General Powell. If President Obama wanted to avoid a similar fiasco, he might be forced to continue with the Bush-Petraeus strategy for Iraq. For the Bush White House staff, that would be continuity indeed.