“The Kinds of Wars We Must Master”

When the Iraq War was still raging in 2006, General Petraeus wrote in the U.S. Army’s Military Review that his forces had learned a tremendous amount in Iraq and Afghanistan about how to fight guerrilla insurgencies, but the United States military needed to continue to learn from those conflicts because “America’s overwhelming conventional military superiority makes it unlikely that future enemies will confront us head on.” The vaunted American commander conceded that these two insurgencies were not the “wars for which we were best prepared in 2001; however, they are the wars we are fighting and they clearly are the kinds of wars we must master.” Petraeus soberly reminded his soldiers that a “liberating force must act quickly, because every Army of liberation has a half-life beyond which it turns into an Army of occupation.”

While he referred only to the two major dirty wars that the United States was engaged in at the time, Petraeus could equally have been talking about American involvement in the Philippines after 1898, the chases after Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua in the late 1920s and early 1930s or Pancho Villa in northern Mexico in 1916, or Vietnam sixty years later.