In Afghanistan, on the other hand, things started out small and networked, but Obama gave way to his generals' preference for large numbers on the ground, and got only more casualties and a less patient public in return for his surge there. (N.B. to Sen. McCain: It was not the surge of additional troops to Iraq that made the difference there; it was fighting in a fundamentally different way, with much smaller combat formations that did.) Now President Obama is having a "Lincoln moment," readjusting the approach in Afghanistan once more, downward in numbers, upward in terms of the amount of networking with friendly locals. Don't be misled by all the attention being given to his use of drones. They do too little, too slowly over time. The way ahead, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, is the path of the small team, highly networked, better able to locate the hidden enemy and engage him.
After sacking six commanders of his main armies in the Eastern theater of operations, Abraham Lincoln finally found a general willing to undertake a cordon offensive: Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln soon put him in charge of all Union forces, and Grant worked hand-in-hand with his great collaborator William Tecumseh Sherman to bring about victory. To be sure, there were other very fine Union commanders by the end of the war -- a long, hard conflict can have a tremendous winnowing effect -- but Grant and Sherman were the principal players.
Barack Obama has followed a somewhat similar path, bringing to the fore senior commanders who have more than proved their understanding of the strategic demands of war in this post-modern era. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, in one of his first pronouncements as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, spoke of the importance of crafting a more highly networked military. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Army chief of staff, presided over much of the turnaround in Iraq, when the shift to an outpost strategy and the rise of the Awakening Movement turned the tide of battle there. Just a week ago in this magazine, he wrote of a future American force that would be comprised of small, wide-ranging units girding the globe but still able to scale up into a larger concentrated force if necessary. And Adm. William McRaven, head of Special Operations Command, has demonstrated again and again that small numbers can regularly prevail when used in networked fashion to exploit the key information- and mobility-driven advantages that add up to his concept of "relative superiority." And these three are hardly alone. Many others have cracked the code of post-modern conflict as well.
For Abraham Lincoln, it was Grant, Sherman, and those who truly understood their approach to modern warfare. For Barack Obama, it is Dempsey, Odierno, McRaven and a generation of very deeply combat-experienced officers who offer up much hope that the American military will master the nuances of post-modern conflict. So perhaps it is worth giving a nod to Lincoln the strategist in tomorrow night's State of the Union address. For in this very different age, Barack Obama has nonetheless traveled a similar path as commander-in-chief.
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