It helps to be close to the insurgents

Ralph Peters:

LT. Gen. Ray Odierno looks like he could snap an NFL linebacker in half. Yet his voice is so quiet you strain to hear him across the table in an empty pub.

And the general's worth listening to.

Just back from commanding our day-to-day military operations in Iraq, he's been nominated as the Army's next vice chief of staff. He'll take the battlefield's lessons along to that post.

What did Iraq teach Odierno as a soldier? What professional tenets were reinforced by his multiple combat tours?

"First, you have to empower your subordinates. That means you have to underwrite the risks involved," to take the heat when they make mistakes. The general sees this as crucial to our 21st-century Army.

"Second, as a senior leader, you have to trust your instincts . . . you never stop learning and you have to adapt to the changing situation . . . but trust your instincts."

"Third, you have to get out and touch it, feel it, see it." You can't manage a war or a counterinsurgency effort from an office. Nothing substitutes for the sense of reality you get from walking the streets with soldiers and Marines.

So what did an old soldier like Odierno learn about our troops during his successive - and successful - tours in Iraq?

"They are compassionate. They genuinely care - not just about each other, but about Iraqis, too. I saw it again and again. They are compassionate young men and women."

Any surprises about our soldiers? "They've surprised me with their resilience. . . They continue to re-enlist, continue to perform. . . Both leaders and soldiers have shown incredible resilience in the way they've adapted" to the changing situation in Iraq. "And I realized how much we can trust our soldiers."

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The general also feels that a great untold story has been the advances in cooperation between special-operations and conventional forces - right down to the brigade and battalion levels - in just the last 18 months. In the past, the special operators and the grunts usually went their separate ways. Not anymore: "There's real synergy now."

Yet war's essence remains the same: "The principle of war of mass hasn't changed" - the piling-on that overwhelms an enemy - "but now it's a question of what you mass. It may mean massing troops. Another time, you mass aircraft or rockets." In counterinsurgency operations, "it may be money that you mass, or resources."

In the what's-new department, the Army's prospective vice chief is convinced that "We need to better understand the cyber-world piece. . . It's critical to our enemies." In that field and in our information operations, we still have to come to grips with everything from practical capabilities to laws.

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What you get from this exit interview is that our military is a long way from being broken and it has accomplished much. It would be a betrayal of their sacrifices to throw it away as the Democrats and their military advisers advocate. Most importantly, we have demonstrated that we can defeat insurgencies. That can be huge advantage in facing potential adversaries making negotiated solutions more likely. Democrats should also think about that too.