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This chapter explores first-hand insights from President Bush's national security advisor, Stephen J. Hadley, and two National Security Council staff members, Meghan O'Sullivan and Peter Feaver, about the logic of the surge strategy and the process by which that strategy emerged. The “surge” is generally understood as the deployment to Iraq of 20,000 to 30,000 US troops in 2007 to supplement the roughly 160,000 already there. More importantly, however, it reflected a change in strategy in how US forces would be used. They would deploy with Iraqi military and police units and live out among the Iraqi people rather than on US military bases. Their priority would be to help Iraqi forces provide security for the Iraqi people. The surge would also create more time and a better environment in which to build Iraqi security forces. The essential feature of the decision-making process that produced the surge was that from the beginning President Bush was at the center of the process. Ultimately, President Bush's decision to launch the surge ended a major strategic debate within his administration.

This chapter places the surge decision in the context of the broader history of the Iraq War and offers a modestly positive appraisal. Indeed, the surge is only important in how it affected the overall project of the American war in Iraq. The significant question is whether the history of the surge offers lessons beyond itself, or at least whether the surge was decisive for achieving US objectives. The chapter then examines various dilemmas and challenges that the war occasioned—of relating strategy to both operations and politics; of promoting democratization in Iraq while also seeking some control over Iraqi decision making; and of seeking to exert presidential command over a complex decision-making process. It argues that the surge decision reflected a “delicate and skillful exercise in leadership” given civil-military tensions, but questions how well the surge answered the broader strategic questions surrounding American involvement.

This chapter studies the relationship between strategy and the surge. Strategy is the bridge that links military operations and political objectives in war. A practical strategy describes those objectives and explains how military action will achieve them. The chapter disputes the idea that the surge constituted a new US strategy in Iraq. Instead, it can be considered as a “decision to put strategy on hold.” The surge, the chapter argues, encouraged a perverse strategic effect—by obscuring the political objectives of the war, it undercut efforts to forge competent and self-reliant governance in Iraq and contributed to the breakdown of the Iraqi state in the face of the subsequent rise of the Islamic State.

This chapter argues—using the Eisenhower administration as a model of peacetime national security decision making—that the surge decision-making process displayed by the oral histories was idiosyncratic, excessively compartmentalized, and profoundly flawed. No president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has fully adopted his model, and each has tailored procedures appropriate for his needs. The Bush process had to take into account his lack of expertise in military affairs, an increasingly polarized political climate, the legacy of the Vietnam War, the proliferation of leaks of sensitive information in the new media age, the resistance of the uniformed military leadership, and most important, Rumsfeld. Administration insiders argue that for these reasons Bush jettisoned fundamental tenets of Eisenhower's system in an effort to make a virtue out of necessity. Yet the evidence suggests that Eisenhower's best practices are just that—best practices. It further suggests that their rigorous application would have benefited Bush's process by expediting the instigation of a comprehensive review, co-opting opponents of a change in strategy, mitigating politicization, facilitating the exchange of information and advice, and accelerating implementation.

This chapter challenges the notion that the surge effort emerged from a process characterized by high degrees of internal dysfunction and civil–military discord. Instead, the challenges and frustrations in the Bush administration stemmed primarily from difficulties among the president's civilian advisors, not between civilians and the uniformed military. The president and his closest advisors acknowledged from the outset that removing the bureaucratic impediment of an opposing secretary of defense would be essential and worked that problem in parallel. They allowed misplaced concern about veteran criticism to delay the process, but developing and reaching consensus on the new strategy might have taken as long even without that concern. The president's closest advisors also understood that the president needed a different approach himself to engaging on the issues; he had to become a different kind of commander in chief for the strategy reviews to produce a better outcome in the war. Ultimately, the very different civil–military relationship that produced the 2006 surge was entirely a function of changes on the civilian side of the equation.

This chapter offers a comparison of George W. Bush's decision-making process in the Iraq War with that of Lyndon B. Johnson's in the Vietnam War. In both Vietnam and Iraq, the United States had to fight an insurgent campaign that was supported by powerful regional adversaries determined to bring down a US-backed government. In both Vietnam and Iraq, America's superior military technology had limited effectiveness against an enemy who relied on simple but lethal weapons and could blend into the general population. In both Vietnam and Iraq, gaining the trust of that population was vital to the success of the overall mission yet proved frustratingly elusive. And in deciding what to do in response, the national security decision-making apparatus in both the Johnson and Bush administrations ultimately produced a consensus behind the president's decision, either to surge US troops to restore deteriorating security and political stability (in 1965 and 2007) or to begin the process of de-escalation and eventually withdrawal (1968). There were key differences, too, which the chapter also explores, but the similarities are uncanny.

The George W. Bush administration showed signs of biased decision-making before and after the 2003 Iraq invasion, which it claimed was necessary because Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. With Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, the administration focused narrowly on regime change and failed to plan for the aftermath of war. With the fall of Baghdad, the administration expanded US goals under the Coalition Provisional Authority without the capabilities to pursue them. Although the administration adjusted course in 2007, its new “surge” strategy, based on counterinsurgency principles, had the US military pursuing modest goals to suit available capabilities. Then the administration benefited unexpectedly from an alliance with Sunni insurgents (the Anbar Awakening) and the stand-down of the principal Shiite militia opposing US forces. US strategy finally amounted to staying the course through 2011, when the Obama administration chose to leave Iraq rather than seek a negotiated compromise.