Spiegel: Would you agree that you are trying to impose a sort of a cultural revolution on the United States Army?
Petraeus: There is quite a big cultural change going on. We used to say, that if you can do the "big stuff," the big combined arms, high-end, high intensity major combat operations and have a disciplined force, then you can do the so-called "little stuff," too. That turned out to be wrong.
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You know, people look at this in theory and think, well, we're dealing here with the training of a couple of battalions -- give them rifles, vehicles, materials, stuff like that, rebuild their infrastructure. But it has cost $2 billion so far -- and that's real money.
And that's the easiest part of it, actually. The hard part is building the institutions to support the new security system, and I'm not only talking about logistics here. I'm talking about the policies, the big over-arching ideas, I'm talking about the set of values on which this system is built. These are questions that are constitutional almost by nature. And I'm talking about ministries, communications systems, depot and maintenance programs, branch schools and training centers, airfields, naval bases, barracks and so on.
Change is Hard.
What we are trying to do is to present counter-intuitive situations to people to really make them think. And counterinsurgency operations are war at the graduate level, they're thinking man's warfare.
What we simply don't want anymore is to give people a checklist of what to do. We want them to think, not memorize.
Petraeus wants to send young officers to graduate school.
