The incoming head of U.S. Central Command, Army Gen. David Petraeus, plans to form a team of under 100 experts to conduct a top-to-bottom strategic assessment of CentCom’s area of responsibility.
Petraeus tapped Col. (P) H.R. McMaster to lead the Joint Strategic Assessment Team, or JSAT, according to multiple sources.
McMaster is widely regarded as one of the Army’s most capable officers. He is the author of “Dereliction of Duty,” an examination of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s performance during the Vietnam War, and he commanded the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar in western Iraq, a deployment that came to be seen as a model of how to conduct counterinsurgency at the local level.
The team will include people from government, the military and academia.
Petraeus takes charge at CentCom on Oct. 31 and the JSAT will begin its work immediately thereafter.
Sources said the work would likely be completed in February.
A U.S. government source described the JSAT as “a team of teams” composed of a total of fewer than 100 people. Those teams are still being assembled, sources said. Partly because the work of recruiting people for the JSAT has just begun, sources were unwilling or unable to name any confirmed participants other than McMaster.
“There’ll be senior, experienced people from across government who will serve as kind of mentors and senior consultants to the group,” the government source said.
Since being tapped for the job, McMaster has been trying to keep the effort “low key” out of a concern that “once there’s press attention, some people won’t be as candid or forthcoming with their assessments and opinions,” a U.S. government source said.
In addition, some of those involved worried that if the initiative became public too quickly, “people could get their knives out and try to undermine this thing,” the source added. “There could be the suspicion that this is kind of a military takeover of policy, which it’s not. The idea is to take enduring interests and policy, and then figure out how to be more effective at applying a whole-of-government approach to the problem sets across the [area of responsibility].”
Far from being “a military takeover of policy,” the JSAT’s goal is “to try to make sure that all of CentCom’s efforts are subordinated to policy and diplomatic goals,” the U.S. government source said.
“This is an interdepartmental effort, not a CentCom-driven effort to get the departments to conform to their vision,” the government source said. “It’s an effort to benefit from the broad expertise that exists across the various departments of government, and for Petraeus to have that kind of an assessment that draws on all these different competencies.”
Retired Lt. Col. John Nagl, a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security who, while on active duty, played a leading role in the writing of the service’s new counterinsurgency doctrine, said that he had not been invited to join the JSAT, but that he’d be “proud to serve” if asked, and described himself as “thrilled” that Petraeus is embarking on the strategic assessment.
“That’s exactly what needs to happen,” he said.
“We’re obviously not doing well in Afghanistan right now,” Nagl said. “We need to rethink this problem, and Petraeus and McMaster are exactly the right people to do that rethinking.”
The solutions to the challenges the United States and its allies face in Afghanistan “are pretty obvious,” Nagl said. “We need more boots on the ground, we need a bigger Afghan National Army, we need a less convoluted chain of command. We need a focused political, military, economic solution to this problem. The principles that applied in Iraq clearly also apply in Afghanistan, but this problem is actually harder.”
“We all know what needs to happen,” Nagl said. “The question is whether we’re going to commit the resources required to resource the strategy.”
Nagl was one of several sources who noted that by establishing the JSAT, Petraeus is repeating on a larger scale what he did in early 2007 as the new Multi-National Force-Iraq commander, when he also put McMaster in charge of a strategic assessment team. That time, Petraeus “found it very useful,” said a military officer familiar with Petraeus’ thinking.
“It validated some things, it brought other things to light,” the officer said. “Not all the recommendations were taken at face value, but it’s very useful to have those kinds of, so to speak, external looks to bring new ideas [and] new sets of eyes onto the problem.”
Petraeus to clean up CENTCOM
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