The US troop surge succeeded in Iraq because the army embraced new ideas about waging war against insurgents, focusing on winning the trust of local people, top commander General David Petraeus said Thursday.
Credited for helping turn around the US war effort in Iraq, Petraeus said at an awards ceremony that it was an earlier "surge of ideas" that laid the foundation for military progress.
Petraeus described his effort along with fellow officers to change the US Army's thinking about warfare, including drafting a new counter-insurgency manual in the midst of the Iraq conflict.
He said that "the most important surge in Iraq was not the surge of forces; rather, it was the surge of ideas that guided the employment of our forces in Iraq."
"Without these ideas on the conduct of counterinsurgency operations, we would not have achieved the gains that were made during the surge and beyond," he said.
Petraeus, the former US commander in Iraq who took over amid spiraling violence, now leads US Central Command, overseeing both the Iraq and Afghan wars.
He gave his speech at a black-tie event in which he accepted an award from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, which publicly backed the idea of a troop buildup in Iraq that former president George W. Bush eventually approved in 2007.
It was a highly partisan setting for an address by a prominent four-star general, as the think tank regularly blasts President Barack Obama's policies.
The most influential American general in decades, Petraeus has been hailed as a warrior-scholar who rescued the US mission in Iraq. But his detractors call him "King David," portraying him as an ego-driven "political general" out to burnish his reputation.
Given his near celebrity status and his media friendly attitude, commentators have speculated the general might be gunning for public office but Petraeus has insisted he has no such plans.
In his speech, Petraeus recounted his reform efforts in 2005-2006 at the helm of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, overseeing the education of army leaders and combat training.
Enlisting other commanders and experts outside the military in drafting a counterinsurgency manual, he said his team sought to promulgate a new doctrine that reflected conditions in Iraq, instead of conventional warfare scenarios dating back to the Cold War.
"In the past, in fact, we had tended to teach leaders what to think, and we generally gave them a finite number of conventional missions and enemy approaches on which to focus," he said.
"Now, we were striving to teach them how to think and telling them that they had to be prepared for anything from conventional operations to stability and support operations, and everything in between."
The "big ideas" about living among the population and winning over hearts and minds took root and shaped new training courses, he said, and "enabled the considerable progress that we have seen over the last three years" in Iraq.
These same ideas were shaping the US-led effort in the war in Afghanistan, he said.
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