I did a mini-review of Greg Jaffe and David Cloud’s captivating book The Fourth Star a couple weeks ago, and now Andrew Exum gives Jaffe the AM treatment, in a talk that’s far more revealing than the thoughts I offered. I particularly like this bit of Jaffe pushback about Gen. Casey, the surge and Afghanistan:

This whole conventional vs. irregular debate is stupid. War is war. And we waste far too much energy trying to categorize it. I think most lieutenants, captains and majors are beyond this false conventional vs. irregular frame that we try to impose on war. I wish I could say the same for the more senior people in the Pentagon. My worry isn’t that we’ll skew too much towards irregular. My worry is that the surge in Iraq made it all look too easy and that deep down we think that if we just add 44,000 more troops to Afghanistan we can have the same result. I know McChrystal doesn’t believe it. I know you don’t believe it.

First, on the way the captains and the majors view the debate, from my experience, Jaffe is right. They’re scaling up and down the spectrum of conflict as is appropriate to the situation. It’s those of us observing the debate in particular who tend to draw a sharper distinction than those who experience it in theater. In fact, go further — the “full-spectrum operations” concept endorsed by Petraeus in this interview last year shows that senior leadership isn’t in an either/or mindset either, although real questions remain about how thoroughly full-spectrum will be operationalized in military education, training and acquisitions, etc. I haven’t figured out a better way to describe it than in my final COIN-series installment, and I own that inadequacy. We as journalists just have to do a better and more nuanced job.

Second, yes, again: assuming what “worked” in Iraq will “work” in Afghanistan is to delude yourself, and to do so deliberately. Everyone says that he or she is not simply applying role lessons from one war to a different one, but I see more evidence, on balance, that that’s exactly what’s happening. How many times did I hear at the Marine Corps University’s COIN conference last month about what the lessons of Iraq were and how experience showed this-or-that. And that’s natural! You want to apply the benefit of experience — that’s what smart people do. But it’s also fraught with peril, and we all need to be rigorous here about checking our assumptions.

Finally, one thing about Casey and Petraeus. I can’t seem to find it on the YouTube machine, but a couple weeks ago I saw an Army recruitment commercial — or, if my terrible memory serves, maybe a commercial geared toward retaining officers — that showed images and footage of the great Army generals, to send the message, “You too can be part of this tradition of greatness.” It took the remarkable step of including a dramatic shot of Petraeus. (You typically don’t do that with contemporary generals, for fear of implicitly slighting all the generals you don’t include.) And it made me think about how Casey, now the Army chief of staff, must have signed off on that. The guy has been implicitly and explicitly measured against Petraeus for three years and found wanting, in public fora, viewed as a total Westmorelandesque failure, and here he is, embracing the Petraeus brand because he thinks that’s what’s best for the Army. That, I think it’s fair to say, is selfless service.