Washington Memo: New Role for Petraeus

By MARK THOMPSON

General David Petraeus' success, however tentative, in turning down the boiling violence in Iraq is winning praise from Washington politicians. But it's his recent trip back to the capital to help select the next crop of the Army's one-star generals that's generating Hooahs! up and down the ranks and may make an even more lasting contribution to U.S. military affairs. Army Secretary Pete Geren, noticing that Petraeus was due to return to the U.S. for a family gathering, decided to saddle the general with an additional task: help groom the service's future leadership.

Petraeus and 14 other Army generals are reviewing the files of about 2,000 colonels, looking for 40 or so worthy of promotion to brigadier general. "This is really unprecedented," says military historian Robert Scales, a retired two-star general and former head of the Army War College. "A whole new generation of officers is coming out of Iraq with new views on how wars should be fought, and its archetype is Dave Petraeus." Defense Secretary Robert Gates approved the unusual assignment, according to Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, because of Petraeus' "progressive" counterinsurgency skills, which rely on persuasion and security as much as on coercion and combat.

Gates scolded the Army last month for promotion policies that too often are "unchanged since the cold war" and combat-training that "left the service unprepared" for Iraq. Rebuilding the service requires "visionary leadership across the service," he said, "and up and down the chain of command." Or maybe it just requires the ability to peer into the past: Petraeus is simply helping a new generation of soldiers learn the lessons in unconventional warfare the Army abandoned following its inglorious exit from Vietnam.