[Warrior-Mentor]

The answer, clearly, is no. "Watch Cops," says Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Schlemmer, one of the students. "The state troopers always keep their cool, no matter what is going on." Johnson moves toward the center of the class and asks, "Did you hear them say, 'I know that "shut up"?' Who do they know that from?" Maj. Derrick Fishback answers: "Saddam." Johnson nods: "It goes from one oppressor to another. This is not easy stuff. It is counterinsurgency."

Schmitt and Johnson teach that when fighting an insurgency, the second-order effects of a mission are as important as the initial tactical maneuver. Some officers believe American forces in Iraq do not always fully consider such unintended consequences, in part because some commanders do not encourage dissenting views from their staff. Such units are susceptible to "groupthink," says Gregory Fontenot, a retired colonel who wrote a history of the Iraq invasion. Fontenot has begun a pilot program at Fort Leavenworth to teach officers how to serve as a commander's designated skeptic--or in military parlance, the "red team." A good red-team officer puts forward a contrary point of view, not something a rigid hierarchy necessarily reacts well to. "You want someone who can be critical," Fontenot says, "without bringing out the antibodies." Says Wallace, "If we don't have someone thinking like a potential adversary, we are doomed not to take into account culture and nontraditional military thought."

Consequences. With or without red teams, many Army officers are growing increasingly aware that they must become better at predicting consequences and ensuring they do not create more insurgents than they eliminate. The concept is being taught not just in the classroom but also at the Army training centers. From the simulated mosque in the Fort Irwin "town" of Medina Jabal, the sounds of the evening call to prayer crackle over a loudspeaker. As Petraeus and the "mayor" sit down for a cup of tea, Staff Sgt. Albert Ortega watches.

Ortega, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is a member of Fort Irwin's resident opposition force. He plays the role of a Sunni Arab bus driver named "Imran," whose loyalties shift depending on the actions of the American force in training. The 2nd Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade, a Fort Lewis, Wash.-based unit, is about to finish its two-week Fort Irwin training in preparation for Iraq deployment later this year. The brigade has been doing a good job, and the opposition force's fence-sitters are generally remaining neutral. But a few days before, the brigade "detained" Ortega. The Americans seized him, he claims, for no reason. Not only did the detention give him some new motivation for his character, but it prompted him to do some thinking about his next deployment to Iraq. After the mock experience of being detained, "we have some insight on how the Iraqi civilians feel," Ortega says. "When we are over there, you think every Iraqi you see might be an insurgent. But you want to be sympathetic to the people trying to live their everyday life."

As the sun begins to fade, Ortega says he is particularly interested in how the brigade will handle crowd control. Indeed, the next day Ortega is doing his best to provide a challenge. Ortega's short beard and robelike dishdasha make him a convincing Iraqi. The soldiers in training do not immediately recognize him as a member of the opposition force.

In front of the "town hall," a large group of Iraqis has gathered, awaiting the Sunni imam. The American soldiers are on edge. It is the last day of their training, and they suspect something big will happen. One soldier has already caught a would-be sniper nearby. Ortega slips into the crowd. He begins pointing and yelling at Sgt. Christopher Thomas. Thomas tries to calm him down, but the nearby Iraqi-American actors start yelling, too. Thomas points his rifle at Ortega. The Iraqi crowd falls silent for a split second, then surges forward. Thomas reaches out and shoves Ortega backward.

At that point, a trainer intervenes to talk to Thomas. Before the changes at the training center, these observer-controllers would stand back and take notes. But now, when they see a soldier do something wrong, they step in immediately to correct the behavior. Later that morning, the observer-controllers conduct an after-action review, to discuss how the unit handled the rally. On a whiteboard mounted on the side of his humvee, Staff Sgt. Adrian Tennant lists crowd control among the skills the platoon needs to improve before it ships out to Iraq. "How are you going to fix the problem?" Tennant asks the platoon.

"The key is not to get frustrated," suggests Staff Sgt. Jon Hilliard, one of the platoon's squad leaders.

"Do you really want to point your weapon at the crowd?" asks Tennant. "How would you feel if it was pointed at you?"

"You don't want to incite a riot if there is no reason to," Hilliard answers.

Today, most American military officers in Iraq argue that making sure the population comes to support their efforts, or at least does not actively support the insurgency, is one of the most important parts of their job. To some, that is what "winning hearts and minds" means. But Lt. Col. Charles Eassa, an Army information operation officer at Fort Leavenworth, argues that winning hearts and minds is an "intangible phrase" and may be an impossible goal. "I don't need you to like me," Eassa says. "I need you to trust that I will do what I said." The idea is that if Iraqis have confidence that American forces will fulfill their promises, they will feel more secure and put their faith in their government, not the insurgency.

Brig. Gen. Robert Cone, the commander of the National Training Center, has devised a novel way to test how well his troops are building "trust and confidence." The observer-controllers record every promise a unit in training makes to the Iraqi-American role-players--and they count how many are broken. To discourage commanders from making promises they cannot keep, the opposition force puts them to a test. If a commander promises to keep a town secure, the insurgents try to attack it.

Cultural terrain. Winning the hearts and minds, or establishing trust and confidence, requires understanding the Iraqis. Military units are good at sharing knowledge of the physical landscape. But they are not so good when it comes to sharing knowledge about such things as the allegiances of local subtribes and the reliability of various local leaders, and much is lost when a unit rotates out. "We used to just focus on the military terrain," Petraeus says. "Now we have to focus on the cultural terrain."

One idea to fix the problem is to create maps or databases of this human terrain. Don Smith, a strategic consultant with Fort Leavenworth's Foreign Military Studies Office, is working on creating ways for Army units to record and share the cultural knowledge they gain. Smith says a human terrain map could also help measure where America is winning the war and where it is losing.

A short way from Medina Jabal, one of the 2nd Infantry Division's battalions has established its headquarters. In the tactical operations center, a large poster shows the interconnections between the people the soldiers have encountered during two-week training. Sifting through intelligence, the battalion has been able to decipher the links between some of the "insurgents" and "townspeople" in Medina Jabal. American units now in Iraq, Petraeus says, have used this type of analysis to make significant inroads against the insurgency. The better a unit understands the insurgency in its area, for instance, the more it can target specific houses and the less it has to search entire neighborhoods with broad sweeps that alienate Iraqis.

The 2nd I.D.'s intelligence poster is the work of Staff Sgt. Shawn Ray. Petraeus leans back, nodding his head as he examines the connections that Ray has made. "All right," Petraeus says. "You've cracked the code here."

"Yes, sir," Ray answers, in a voice made hoarse by the desert dust.

"What would help you get ... precise, actionable intel?" the general asks. "So you can do a cordon and knock, not a cordon and search. Who has given you the highest-quality stuff?"

"It's company commanders, even Joe on the ground who has someone come up to him," Ray says.

"Yup, yup," Petraeus says, motioning to his aide, who produces a coin. It reads, "Presented by the Commanding General for outstanding performance." Petraeus offers Ray his hand and slips the coin into the sergeant's palm.

Three years on, the Army increasingly recognizes that mistakes were made during the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath. Those errors helped the insurgency to bloom and handed America a difficult, complex conflict. "It is not the fight we wanted," Wallace says, "but it's the fight we got." So the Army has set out to prove it can remake its doctrine, schools, and training centers in the midst of war. "The goal is to help our Army be a learning organization," says Petraeus, "and we think there is a lot of that going on."

Perhaps someday, soldiers will tell stories about the new National Training Center: tales of how their unit took out a sniper before he could shoot an imam, or how they persuaded one sect not to attack another. But for now, of course, there are real stories from a real war.