Recently I was thrilled to read two good news articles about Iraq in a single day in the Washington Post. One had to do with an Army program “that is sending 21 Army officers to graduate school [in the United States] to learn about foreign cultures, business practices and language, including Arabic.” The other was about a counterinsurgency school north of Baghdad called the COIN (counterinsurgency) Academy. As the Post's Thomas Ricks puts it (Ricks is author of the stellar book Making the Corps that follows a group of Marine recruits through Parris Island), “Again and again, the intense immersion course, which 30 to 50 officers attend at a time, emphasizes that the right answer is probably the counterintuitive one.”

That's the sort of thing I've attempted to teach for years. Sure, you can shoot from the hip. Go ahead, just break something. It feels good. But usually it's the worst possible course of action. Just because you want to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. You have to have thought about it beforehand so you act correctly under pressure. It's this reflection business that takes work, what I try to get in my stated goal of helping produce a “thinking officer.”

Both of these articles are good news because all too often in the military people forget the dictum “know your enemy,” abandoning it to the more knee-jerk “kill your enemy.” Not that the latter might not be necessary, but all interaction with people who are different requires knowing who they are and how they think. Besides, in the post-combat phase, you can't interact with people by simply blowing them away. At some point they aren't the enemy any more. If one thing is sure, it's this: life goes on, even after the pump of making things go boom.

Col. Mark Patterson, who according to the Post is “in charge of policy for developing the Army officer corps,” is quoted as saying this about the program to send officers to graduate school in the States: “We're trying to develop officers to be strategic thinkers and creative managers . . . who are culturally aware and have some language capability.” Culturally aware? Language capability? Hoo-yah, I say

Ricks comes on even stronger in this vein about the COIN academy. He quotes the textbook, a huge binder: “‘On the surface, a raid that captures a known insurgent or terrorist may seem like a sure victory for the coalition,' [the textbook] observes in red block letters. It continues, ‘The potential second- and third-order effects, however, can turn it into a long-term defeat if our actions humiliate the family, needlessly destroy property, or alienate the local population from our goals.'”

This is the language of some heavy thinking; like that of the Pentagon's exhaustive pre-invasion studies (according to some news sources, ignored by the White House) of what life would be like in Iraq after the shooting stopped. Such focus on the second- and third-order effects of combat is available to general readers more usually in works like those of the Divinity-School graduate Chris Hedges, such as What Every Person Should Know About War. This slim and very important work (I assign it to plebes, first-year students) poses a series of sober questions -- the book is based on a manual for soldiers almost a century ago -- to consider all aspects of enlistment, engagement, and aftermath. How much will I get paid? What does it feel like to die? Will I remain friends with my battlefield buddies? (Surprisingly, the answer to the last is “probably not.” Hedges provides sources and citations for all the answers.) The thrust of the book, if it has one other than mere information transmission, is to make the point that battle isn't merely about pulling the trigger or plunging in the knife. All wars have ripple effects. They destroy infrastructures, they create widows and orphans, they main the men who survive – on both sides.

Teaching about such things to officers in the theater of operations in the COIN academy must seem to some like “non-motivational” thinking. Ricks cites numerous examples of officers who didn't want to attend, and couldn't imagine why they were being taken away from their troops -- and then were glad they were made to go. The resistance, I can guess based not only on this article but also on my own experiences trying to get people to simmer down and think, must have been fierce. It's not the way the military traditionally does things.

No wonder Ricks says this: “At points, the school's leaders seem to go out of their way to challenge current U.S. military practices here.” Thinking about how to get along with people? How to talk to them in their own language? How to consider ripple effects of our actions? You mean it isn't over when I make it go boom? And how about that one about how if our actions “humiliate the family” of those we kill we might be well advised to re-consider? Since when do we have to worry about not hurting people's feelings?

Since forever, only usually we don't. And then we're surprised when we pay the price. Those are the second- and third-order effects COIN is talking about.

Is this a kinder gentler military or merely a wiser one? Actually it's the same one: all these stories renew my faith in the military's pragmatism, something I've written about before. And that's one of the military's most endearing qualities. You can start from principles, but ultimately, as a Naval Academy T-shirt has it, the bottom line is “Git-‘er-done.” Those officers are smart men and women, and it's ultimately about Mission. Looks to me as if somebody's thinking hard about Mission here.