The Dissenter Who Changed the War
As the No. 2 Commander in Iraq, Raymond Odierno Challenged the Military Establishment, Pressing for More Troops and a Long-Term Strategy to Guide Them
By Thomas E. Ricks
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, February 8, 2009; A01
Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno was an unlikely dissident, with little in his past to suggest that he would buck his superiors and push the U.S. military in radically new directions.
A 1976 West Point graduate and veteran of the Persian Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign, Odierno had earned a reputation as the best of the Army’s conventional thinkers – intelligent and ambitious, but focused on using the tools in front of him rather than discovering new and unexpected ones. That image was only reinforced during his first tour in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003.
As commander of the 4th Infantry Division in the Sunni Triangle, Odierno led troops known for their sometimes heavy-handed tactics, kicking in doors and rounding up thousands of Iraqi “MAMs” (military-age males). He finished his tour believing the fight was going well. “I thought we had beaten this thing,” he would later recall.
Sent back to Iraq in 2006 as second in command of U.S. forces, under orders to begin the withdrawal of American troops and shift fighting responsibilities to the Iraqis, Odierno found a situation that he recalled as “fairly desperate, frankly.”
So that fall, he became the lone senior officer in the active-duty military to advocate a buildup of American troops in Iraq, a strategy rejected by the full chain of command above him, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top commander in Iraq and Odierno’s immediate superior.
Communicating almost daily by phone with retired Gen. Jack Keane, an influential former Army vice chief of staff and his most important ally in Washington, Odierno launched a guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq, conducting his own strategic review and bypassing his superiors to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military. It would prove one of the most audacious moves of the Iraq war, and one that eventually reversed almost every tenet of U.S. strategy.
Just over two years ago, President George W. Bush announced that he was ordering a “surge” of U.S. forces. But that was only part of what amounted to a major change in the mission of American troops, in which many of the traditional methods employed by Odierno and other U.S. commanders in the early years of the war were discarded in favor of tactics based on the very different doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare.
Now, President Obama, an opponent of the war and later the surge, must deal with the consequences of the surge’s success – an Iraq that looks to be on the mend, with U.S. casualties so reduced that commanders talk about keeping tens of thousands of soldiers there for many years to come.
The most prominent advocates of maintaining that commitment are the two generals who implemented the surge and changed the direction of the war: Odierno and David H. Petraeus, who replaced Casey in 2007 as the top U.S. commander in Iraq and became the figure most identified with the new strategy. But if Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, was the public face of the troop buildup, he was only its adoptive parent. It was Odierno, since September the U.S. commander in Iraq, who was the surge’s true father.
In arguing for an increase in U.S. forces in Iraq, Odierno went up against the collective powers at the top of the military establishment. As late as December 2006, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was privately telling his colleagues that he didn’t see that 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could do anything that 140,000 weren’t doing. The month before, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of Central Command, told a Senate hearing that he and every general he had asked opposed sending more U.S. forces to Iraq. “I do not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem,” Abizaid emphasized.
This account of the military’s internal struggle over the direction of the Iraq war is based on dozens of interviews with Odierno, Petraeus and other U.S. officials conducted in 2007 and 2008. In many cases, the interviews were embargoed for use until 2009.
Odierno’s role has not been previously reported, and he remains a controversial figure because of his first tour in Iraq, when the tactics he employed violated many of the counterinsurgency principles he would later embrace.
Retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a veteran intelligence officer, concluded that the approach that many U.S. commanders used in the early days of the Iraq war effectively made them recruiters for the insurgency, and he was especially bothered by the actions of Odierno’s division. “Some divisions are conducting operations with rigorous detention criteria, while some – the 4th ID is the negative example – are sweeping up large numbers of people and dumping them at the door of Abu Ghraib,” Herrington wrote in a 2003 report to Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq.
Odierno was determined to operate differently on his second tour of duty, but he will not talk about how his transformation occurred. “I think everyone’s changed,” he said, brushing aside the question in one of a series of interviews in Iraq over the past two years. “We’ve all learned.”
But one impetus, Odierno agreed, was the severe wounding of his son in August 2004. Lt. Anthony Odierno, then in the 1st Cavalry Division, had been leading a patrol near Baghdad’s airport when a rocket-propelled grenade punched through the door of his Humvee, severing his left arm.
“It didn’t affect me as a military officer, I mean that,” Odierno said one evening in Baghdad much later. “It affected me as a person. I hold no grudges. My son and I talked a lot about this. He was doing what he wanted to do, and liked what he was doing.”
But he said it did deepen his determination. “I was going to see this through – I felt an obligation to see this through. That drives me, frankly. I feel an obligation to mothers and fathers. Maybe I understand it better because it happened to me.”
The most important factor in his change in thinking, however, was probably his growing belief, as he prepared to redeploy to Iraq, that the United States was heading toward defeat.
‘THE STRATEGY HAS GOT TO CHANGE’ The General Fears That His Commanders’ Plan Will Lead to Failure.
As the newly designated second in command in Iraq, Odierno was given a clear understanding of the scenario that Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his military superiors expected to play out: The United States would begin drawing down its forces in Iraq, cutting the number of combat troops in 2007 by as much as a third.
His responsibilities were equally clear: moving U.S. forces outside all major cities and establishing a handful of bigger bases along key roads leading into Iraq, deploying U.S. forces to the country’s borders to limit outside influence, speeding up the transition to Iraqi security forces, and letting Iraqis handle fighting in the cities.
But the more the general and his team considered this plan, they less they liked it. They feared that it got ahead of the Iraqis’ ability to do the job and thus, in keeping with the American pattern in Iraq since 2003, was likely to amount to one more rush to failure.
Odierno was “very nervous” about the course of U.S. strategy, he recalled. He decided to formally oppose any additional troop cuts. He wasn’t even thinking about an increase, because, he said, “I didn’t think I could get more.”
He and a small group of advisers decided on a course almost the opposite of the plan given them. Instead of moving out of the cities, they would deploy more forces into them. Instead of consolidating their base structure, they would establish scores of smaller outposts. Nor would they withdraw to the borders. And most emphatically, they would slow, not accelerate, the transition to Iraqi forces.
Odierno realized that to take all those steps, he would need more troops – and before long, it was clear to subordinates that Odierno was at odds with Casey, his commanding officer. “Casey fought it all the way,” recalled Brig. Gen. Joe Anderson, then Odierno’s chief of staff.
In an interview last year, Casey seemed puzzled when told that Odierno had grave doubts about the direction of the war back in late 2006. "Ray never came to me and said, ‘Look, I think you’ve got to do something fundamentally different here,’ " he said.
But to their subordinates, the disagreement was obvious. “We would backbrief one general and get one set of guidances, and then brief the other and get a different set,” remembered a senior Army planner in Iraq.
In Washington, Keane had his own doubts about U.S. policy and was not shy about expressing them. More influential in retirement than most generals in active service, he allied himself with Odierno, advising him to ask for five new brigades. But when Odierno raised that number with Casey, his commander dismissed the notion. "He said, ‘You can do it with two brigades,’ " Odierno recalled. "I said, ‘I don’t know.’ "
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