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David Petraeus

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David Howell Petraeus
AllegianceUnited States Army
Years of service1974 - present
RankGeneral
CommandsA Company, 2nd Battalion, 19th Infantry Regiment (Mechanized)
3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment
1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division
101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)
Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq
U.S. Army Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth
Multi-National Force - Iraq
Battles / warsOperation Iraqi Freedom
Operation Joint Forge (Bosnia)
Operation Restore Democracy (Haiti)
Operation Desert Spring (Kuwait)
AwardsDefense Distinguished Service Medal
Distinguished Service Medal
Defense Superior Service Medal
Legion of Merit
Bronze Star Medal

David Howell Petraeus (born November 7, 1952) is a general in the United States Army and commander of Multi-National Force - Iraq (MNF-I), the four-star post that oversees all U.S. forces in the country. He was confirmed to that position by the Senate in a vote of 81-0 on January 26 2007. He replaced General George Casey who was subsequently confirmed as Chief of Staff of the United States Army. In his new position, Petraeus oversees all forces in Iraq and carries out the new Iraqi strategy plan outlined by the Bush administration.[1] [2] Casey relinquished command in Iraq to Petraeus on February 10 2007. The change of command was presided over by General John Abizaid, then commander of United States Central Command.

Petraeus was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College - class of 1983. He subsequently earned a Master of Public Administration (1985) and a Ph.D. (1987) in International Relations from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor of International Relations at the U.S. Military Academy, and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University. He has a BS from the U.S. Military Academy - class of 1974.

Early years

David Petraeus was born in 1952 to Dutch American parents. His father, Sixtus, was a sea captain who had immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands after World War II. He grew up in Cornwall on Hudson, New York, and graduated from Cornwall Central High School in 1970.

Petraeus then went on to the U.S. Military Academy in nearby West Point. While millions of draftees were fighting in Vietnam, Petraeus skied at West Point, played for the soccer team, and graduated tenth in his class of 1974. In the class yearbook Petraeus was remembered as "always going for it in sports, academics, leadership, and even his social life."[3]

Two months after graduation Petraeus married Holly Knowlton, daughter of retired Army General William A. Knowlton who was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) at the time. They have two grown children, a son and a daughter.

Army career

Petraeus entered the U.S. Military Academy in 1970. He was commissioned an infantry officer upon graduation in 1974. He began his career with an assignment to a light infantry unit, the 509th Airborne Infantry Battalion at Vicenza, Italy; ever since, light infantry has been at the core of his career, punctuated by assignments to mechanized units, command staffs, and educational institutions.

After leaving the 509th as a first lieutenant, Petraeus began a brief association with mechanized units when he became assistant operations officer on the staff of the 2nd Brigade, 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and in 1979, when he was promoted to captain, he was charged with a company in the same division: Company A, 2nd Battalion, 19th Infantry Regiment (Mechanized). Later, in 1978-79, he also served as operations officer to the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized)'s 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment (Mechanized) and its 1st Brigade. In 1981, Petraeus became aide-de-camp to the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized)'s commanding general. (According to NPR his record as aide to various general officers has led some of his detractors to characterize him as a "professional son.")[4]

Petraeus left the 24th's 19th Infantry to continue the higher education he began at West Point, earning the General George C. Marshall Award as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Class of 1983 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He subsequently earned a MPA and a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1985 and 1987, respectively, and later served as an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the U.S. Military Academy. His doctoral dissertation, "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era," dealt with the influence of the Vietnam War on military thinking regarding the use of force. He also completed a military fellowship at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service in 1994-95, although he was called away early to serve in Haiti.

After earning his Ph.D. and teaching at West Point, Petraeus continued up the rungs of the command ladder, serving as military assistant to Gen. John Galvin, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. From there, he moved to the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) and then to a post as aide and assistant executive officer to the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Carl Vuono, in Washington, D.C. He would return to the Pentagon in 1997-99 as Executive Assistant to the Director of the Joint Staff and then to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Henry Shelton.

Upon promotion to lieutenant colonel, Petraeus moved from the office of the Chief of Staff to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he commanded the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)'s 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment from 1991-93. As battalion commander of the Iron Rakkasans, he suffered one of the more dramatic incidents in his career when, in 1991, he was accidentally shot in the chest during a live-fire exercise when a soldier tripped and his rifle discharged. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, where he was operated on by future Senator Bill Frist. [5]

During 1993-94, Petraeus continued his long association with the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) as the division's director of plans, training, and mobilization. His next command, from 1995-97, was the 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, centered on the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. At that post, his brigade's training cycle at Fort Polk's Joint Readiness Training Center for low-intensity warfare was chronicled by novelist and military enthusiast Tom Clancy in his book "Airborne." In 1999, as a brigadier general, Petraeus returned to the 82nd, serving as the assistant division commander for operations and then, briefly, as acting commanding general. From the 82nd, he moved on to serve as Chief of Staff of XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg during 2000-01. In 2000, Petraeus suffered his second major injury, when, during a civilian skydiving jump, his parachute collapsed at low altitude due to a hook turn, resulting in a hard landing that broke his pelvis.

Peacekeeping

Although Petraeus did not see combat before his 2003 deployment to Iraq, he completed three overseas assignments short of war earlier in his career. In 1995, his Georgetown fellowship was cut short when he was assigned to the United Nations command in Haiti as its Chief of Staff during Operation Uphold Democracy. Four years later, as assistant division commander for operations, he deployed with the 82nd Airborne Division to Kuwait as part of Operation Desert Spring, the continuous rotation of combat forces through Kuwait during the decade after the Gulf War.

During 2001-02, as a brigadier general, Petraeus served a ten-month tour in Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of Operation Joint Forge. In Bosnia, he was the NATO Stabilization Force Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations as well as the Deputy Commander of the U.S. Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorism Task Force, a command created after the September 11 attacks to add a counterterrorism capability to the U.S. forces attached to the NATO command in Bosnia.

Iraq

2003 - 2004

File:21 03.jpg
Camp New Jersey, Kuwait (March 21, 2003) - Major General David H. Petraeus (right), commanding general, 101st Airborne Division, (Air Assault) looks on as Lieutenant General William S. Wallace, V Corps commanding general speaks to soldiers.

In 2003, Petraeus, then a major general, commanded the 101st Airborne Division during V Corps's drive to Baghdad. In a campaign chronicled in detail by Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post's book In the Company of Soldiers, Petraeus led his division through the battles of Karbala, Hilla, and Najaf (where he came under fire during an ambush by Iraqi paramilitary forces). The 101st was not, as had been expected, called upon to lead urban combat in Baghdad, leading to some limited criticism of the division's role in the campaign. Instead, as V Corps's lines of supply came under threat from attacks by irregular forces in the cities of the Euphrates river valley, the division's three brigades, reinforced by an armored battalion, took the lead in clearing the cities of Najaf, Karbala, and Hilla. Other notable roles filled by the 101st during the campaign included an armed feint toward Hilla to cover the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized)'s drive through the Karbala Gap, an armed reconnaissance by the division's brigade of Apache attack helicopters, and the relief of beleaguered elements of the 75th Ranger Regiment at the Haditha Dam. Following the fall of Baghdad, the division conducted the longest heliborne assault on record in order to reach Nineveh Province, where it would spend much of the next year (the 1st Brigade was responsible for the area south of Mosul, the 2nd Brigade for the city itself, and the 3rd Brigade for the region stretching toward the Syrian border). Despite his later deployments to Iraq with the Multinational Security Transition Command and the Multinational Force, Petraeus wears the "Screaming Eagle" of the 101st on his right shoulder as his combat patch.

An often-repeated story of Petraeus's time with the 101st is his habit of asking embedded reporters to "Tell me where this ends," an anecdote many journalists have used to portray Petraeus as an early recognizer of the difficulties that would follow the fall of Baghdad. Indeed, it was during the year after the invasion that Petraeus and the 101st gained fame for their performance in Iraq, not for the combat operations in Karbala and Najaf but for the rebuilding and administration of Mosul and Nineveh Province. Described by one former subordinate as "the most competitive man on earth," and by another as "phenomenal at getting people to reach their potential"; these two traits of intensity and cultivation of subordinate officers have widely been reported as key to his success in Mosul. Although Petraeus oversaw a program of public works projects and political reinvigoration that made the city one of the most peaceful in Iraq during the first year of the war, during 2004, after the 101st replacement by I Corps's Task Force Olympia, Mosul became a major battleground in the fight against the Sunni insurgency that erupted that spring. Petraeus and his supporters point to the assassination of the governor of Nineveh the following July, five months after the 101st departed, as the catalyst for the 2004 violence, not the unit's redeployment.

In June 2004, less than six months after the 101st returned to the U.S., Petraeus was promoted to lieutenant general and charged with the task of training the new Iraqi Army and security forces as commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq. During his stay at MNSTC-I, Petraeus oversaw the expansion of Iraqi military and police from nearly zero-strength to considerable size. Critics point to the incomplete state of the Iraqi forces at the time the general handed the command over to Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey in September 2005. Yet despite criticism of Iraqi troops' performance, most accounts of Petraeus's time at MNSTC-I note the sheer scale of the increase in the Iraqi Army's size during the general's tenure. Moreover, Petraeus gained a reputation at MNSTC-I as an effective motivator of Iraqi troops, making many visits to frontline Iraqi units to perform inspections and boost morale, and during his January 2007 Senate testimony, he described both punitive measures he took against Iraqi units that did not live up to expectations and rewards he gave to those units that performed well. One officer who served under Petraeus at MNSTC-I wrote that after working for the general, he was convinced that "He will re-energize a tired U.S. mission in Iraq and refocus their objectives. He is a superb counterinsurgent, and the American people will start to see results in Iraq instead of stagnation."

2005 - 2007

From late 2005 through February 2007[6], Petraeus served as commanding general of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC) located there. As commander of CAC, Petraeus was responsible for oversight of the Command and General Staff College and seventeen other schools, centers, and training programs as well as for development of the Army’s doctrinal manuals, training the Army’s officers, and supervising the Army’s center for the collection and dissemination of lessons learned. During his time at CAC, Petraeus oversaw two major changes geared toward improving the Army performance in Iraq and Afghanistan: he presided over the 1st Infantry Division's revamped training of advisory teams for deployment to Iraqi military and police units, and, with Marine Lt. Gen. James F. Amos, he coauthored Field Manual 3-24, the Army's new official counterinsurgency doctrine.[7] FM 3-24 relies on counterinsurgency tactics Petraeus has long espoused, particularly in Mosul, chiefly the protection of the population from insurgent violence even at greater risk to counterinsurgent personnel.

2007 - present

The commanding general of the 9th Iraqi Army Division, right, speaks with a journalist from the Al-Arabiyah news channel, left, as they walk with General David Petraeus, center, through the Al Shurja market in the Rusafa area of East Baghdad, March 11, 2007.

In January 2007, as part of his overhauled Iraq strategy, President Bush announced that Petraeus would succeed Gen. George Casey as commanding general of MNF-I to lead all U.S. troops in Iraq. On January 24, Petraeus testified before the Senate on his ideas for Iraq, particularly the "surge" strategy of increased U.S. presence in Baghdad that he supports as in line with classic counterinsurgency doctrine. The "surge" strategy, as well as the ideas Petraeus included in FM 3-24, have been referred to by some journalists and politicians as the "Petraeus Doctrine," although the surge itself was proposed well before Petraeus took command. Despite the misgivings of most Democratic and a few Republican senators, over the proposed implementation of the "Petraeus Doctrine" in Iraq, specifically with regards to the troop surge, Petraeus was unanimously confirmed as a four-star general and MNF-I commander on January 27. [8][9]

Before leaving for Iraq Petraeus recruited a number of highly educated military officers, nicknamed "Petraeus guys" or "designated thinkers," to advise him as commander. While most of them are American military officers, he also hired Lt. Col. David Kilcullen of the Australian Army, who was working for the US State Department.[10] His "on-joining" message[11] to troops said, in part, "It is an honor to soldier again with the members of the Multi-National Force-Iraq."

Since taking command of MNF-I on February 10, 2007, Petraeus has inspected U.S. and Iraqi units all over Iraq, visiting outposts not only in greater Baghdad but in Tikrit, Baquba, Ramadi, and as far west as al-Hit.

In April 2007, Petraeus made his first visit to Washington as MNF-I commander, reporting to President Bush and Congress on the progress of the "surge" and the overall situation in Iraq. During this visit he met privately with members of Congress and reportedly argued against setting a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.[12]

In late May, 2007, Congress failed to impose any timetables for war funding legislation for troop withdrawal.[13] The enacted legislation did mandate that Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, deliver a report to Congress by September 15, 2007 detailing their assessment of the military, economic and political situation of Iraq. Despite Petraeus’ statement in June 2007 that there were “astonishing signs of normalcy” in Baghdad[14], which drew criticism from Senate majority leader Harry Reid[15], Petraeus has warned that he expects that the situation in Iraq will require the continued deployment of the elevated troop level of more than 150,000 beyond September 2007; he also has stated that U.S. involvement in Iraq could last another ten years.[16]

Bibliography

  • (1983) Operation Junction City, Vietnam, 1967 (with others) (battlebook)
  • (1985) "The Antagonists," Military Affairs (review essay)
  • (1987) The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam (doctoral thesis)
  • (1987) "The Legacy of Vietnam for the US Military" in Democracy, Strategy, and Vietnam: Implications for American Policymaking (with William J. Taylor)
  • (1987) "Korea, the Never Again Club and Indochina," Parameters
  • (1989) "Military Influence and the Post-Vietnam Use of Force," Armed Forces & Society
  • (1997) "Why We Need FISTs-Never Send a Man When You Can Send a Bullet," Field Artillery Journal
  • (2004) "Lessons of the Iraq War and Its Aftermath" (summary of remarks)
  • (2006) "Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq," Military Review
  • (2007) The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (introduction)

Decorations and Badges

GEN Petraeus, briefs reporters at the Pentagon April 26, 2007, on his view of the current military situation in Iraq.

Notes and references

  1. ^ Holusha, John (January 23 2007). "Petraeus Calls Iraq Situation Dire". The New York Times. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  2. ^ Gordon, Michael (January 5 2007). "Bush to Name a New General to Oversee Iraq". The New York Times. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ Bruno, Greg; January 11, 2007; New Iraq commander is Cornwall's favorite son; Times-Herald Record; retrieved January 13, 2007.
  4. ^ NPR news story
  5. ^ Atkinson, Rick (January 7, 2007). "Iraq Will be Petraeus's Knot to Untie". The Washington Post. p. A15. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  6. ^ External link From the Commander -- Farewell to Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth.
  7. ^ FM 3-24 text
  8. ^ Baker, Peter. "General Is Front Man For Bush's Iraq Plan", The Washington Post, February 7, 2007. Retrieved February 8, 2007.
  9. ^ Sennott, Charles M. "The Petraeus doctrine", The Boston Globe, January 28, 2007. Retrieved February 8, 2007.
  10. ^ Ricks, Thomas E. "Petraeus selects team of warrior-intellectuals", MSNBC, February 5, 2007. Retrieved February 7, 2007.
  11. ^ Charen, Mona "Petraeus' Message", National Review Online, 28 February 2007
  12. ^ "Senate passes Iraq withdrawal bill; veto threat looms". CNN. 2007-04-26. Retrieved 2007-05-12. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  13. ^ Congress surrenders to Bush, FinalCall
  14. ^ Petraeus says security crackdown working, USA Today
  15. ^ Reid Blasts Generals on Iraq (June 15,2007),Capital Hill Blue
  16. ^ Iraq 'Challenges' to Last for Years (June 18, 2007), Washington Post
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