An era in the American military came to an end on Wednesday when David H. Petraeus, the most influential general of his generation, retired with a 17-gun salute and a warning that coming budget cuts should not lead to the “hollow Army” that occurred after the Vietnam War.
Just 11 days before the 10th anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s attacks on New York and Washington, General Petraeus also implicitly cautioned that the United States should not abandon the troop-intensive and expensive counterinsurgency doctrine that was his hallmark when he commanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The general spoke as the Obama White House is shifting from a broad counterinsurgency strategy of trying to build roads, schools and good government in Afghanistan to a narrower and more secretive counterterrorism mission of hunting down terrorists.
General Petraeus said that the United States should keep counterinsurgency as a doctrine – he helped write the military’s updated manual on it in 2005 and 2006 – if only because war is unpredictable and the military needs to be trained for all possibilities.
“We have relearned since 9/11 the timeless lesson that we don’t always get to fight the wars for which we’re most prepared or most inclined,’’ General Petraeus said at the retirement ceremony, held in the bright sunshine of the parade ground at Fort Myer, near Arlington National Cemetery. “Given that reality, we will need to maintain the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.’’
General Petraeus, 58, will arrive on Tuesday in a civilian business suit as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His last day in uniform, after 37 years in the Army, was not only a turning point in his own life but also in the military, signaling the end, or so President Obama hopes, of the wars that defined the first decade of the 21st century. General Petraeus has told friends that going to the CIA will still keep him “in the fight’’ –perhaps as much as if he had stayed in the military, given the Obama administration’s move toward covert operations.
The job he really wanted, General Petraeus has told friends, was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but Mr. Obama chose a less celebrated and far less public military man, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the current Army Chief of Staff. It was General Petraeus himself who then raised the idea of going to the CIA, an agency he knew as an avid consumer of American intelligence in Baghdad and Kabul. Mr. Obama named General Petraeus as his CIA chief in April, and although General Petraeus did not have to retire from the Army to take the job, he chose to do so in order to draw a line between the military and intelligence worlds.
General Petraeus’ retirement ceremony, held on a warm morning with light breezes and little humidity, was a reunion of sorts for the military and civilian veterans who had worked with him during the troop surges he oversaw in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zalmay Khalilazad, a former American ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan who was born in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was there, as was Meghan L. O’Sullivan, the Bush White House’s deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan and a onetime aide to L. Paul Bremer III, the former top American civilian administrator in Iraq.
From Afghanistan came Mark Sedwill, the NATO senior civilian representative there, and from Pakistan came the ambassador to the United States, Hussein Haqqani.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was there as a host and showered General Petraeus with superlatives, at one point even comparing him to the great generals of American history – Ulysses S. Grant, John J. Pershing, George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“You now stand among the giants, not just in our time, but of all time,’’ Admiral Mullen said.
Members of General Petraeus’ 1974 class from the United States Military Academy at one point lustily chanted “Peaches, Peaches, Peaches’’ – the general’s nickname at West Point. General Petraeus’ two children and his wife, Holly Petraeus, were there as well. General Petraeus thanked Mrs. Petraeus for being “Mrs. Dad for the bulk of the last decade while I’ve been deployed.’’
I slut you sir.
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