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David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War
Simon & Schuster
January 2013
On Sale: January 2, 2013
418 pages
ISBN: 1451642636
EAN: 9781451642636
Kindle: B008J4RONU
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
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.
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. These would be wars not
only of fighting but of “nation building,” often not of
necessity but of choice. Based 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. But the main insurgency is the one mounted at
home by ambitious, self-consciously intellectual
officers—Petraeus, John Nagl, H. R. 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. 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.
Fred Kaplan describes how these men and women
maneuvered the idea through the bureaucracy and made it
official policy. This is a story of power, politics, ideas,
and personalities—and how they converged to reshape the
twenty-first-century American military. 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. 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.
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